Just saw Rob Keniger’s Wrapster plug-in for Coda, an interesting use of event taps; it’s a plug-in that intercepts key events for its master application.

The version I looked at (1.2) uses a global tap and checks if its master application is active:

   if(![NSApp isActive]) {
      return event;
   }

Of course, it would be conceptually more reliable to obtain the event’s destination process PSN and test against that; but the best way would be to tap the current process like this:

   ProcessSerialNumber psn = {kNoProcess, kCurrentProcess};
   CFMachPortRef tapg = CGEventTapCreateForPSN(&psn, kCGTailAppendEventTap, kCGEventTapOptionDefault, CGEventMaskBit(kCGEventKeyDown), ProcessEvent, NULL);

Global event taps are a great tool, but they’re also easy to abuse, and I suppose that in a year or two we might have dozens of utilities or plug-ins tapping events; the actual results might be dependent on the order they run or load, for instance, and overall responsiveness might suffer. Therefore, please make absolutely sure that you need a global tap to do whatever you want to do, that it takes as little time as possible, and that it does careful parameter checking.

One great application to test event taps (and to check their presence) is Event Tap Testbench. Its author, Bill Cheeseman, has helped me a lot with subtle details of both event taps and the Accessibility APIs; thanks Bill! Do also check out their other products.

Rob tests if Accessibility is enabled by trying to create a tap and seeing if it succeeds. While this works, I think it’s easier to do it like this:

   if (!AXAPIEnabled()&&!AXIsProcessTrusted()) {
      // error dialog here
   }

The first call checks if Accessibility is enabled in System Preferences; the second checks if your process is allowed to set a key tap even with Accessibility disabled. To achieve this, you must (from a process running as root) call AXMakeProcessTrusted() on the tapping application’s executable – this will take effect on its next run.

In the case of Klicko, it taps only mouse button events, for which Accessibility doesn’t need to be on; however, it uses the Accessibility APIs to check out details about the clicked-on windows. Some people dislike turning Accessibility on in System Preferences, so a future version of Klicko might use AXMakeProcessTrusted() to avoid this; this means asking the user for an Administrator password and running a separate tool, like Quay does. I’m still evaluating the trade-offs for that: it precludes running Klicko from ~/Applications or from the disk image, adds to the application size, and the user has to navigate an extra dialog on first run.

Update:Klicko now uses AXMakeProcessTrusted().