Let’s say I want to bring Mail.app to front – how would I do that?

If I use NSWorkSpace to launch it, it probably gets a re-activate event, which could cause opening of a new window and currently I have the problem that even though the application does activate, the windows are not brought to front.

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You could always embed an applescript in your application using the NSAppleScript class. This is how I remove songs from iTunes in iSweep and it works fairly well. Given my preference, I would use an Objective-C framework or class api to connect to and manipulate iTunes, but I wasn’t able to find one, so I had to rely on AppleScript for this part of iSweep’s functioncality.

– DaveGiffin

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You can get the app’s ProcessSerialNumber via NSWorkspace and then use Carbon ProcessManager calls to activate it.

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AppleScript really is the easiest way here. Just execute it using NSAppleScript

tell application “Mail” to activate

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Unfortunately AppleScript has a noticeable startup delay on “slower” machines. Try this on your machine (from Terminal.app):

time osascript -e ‘current date’

So I’ve done the ProcessManager solution, which is (anApp being the dictionary I get from NSWorkSpace):

struct ProcessSerialNumber psn = { anApp objectForKey:@”[[NSApplicationProcessSerialNumberHigh”] unsignedLongValue], anApp objectForKey:@”[[NSApplicationProcessSerialNumberLow” ] unsignedLongValue], }; SetFrontProcess(&psn);