[Pythonmac-SIG] Nested app bundles

[Gary Bernhardt]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 7:57 PM, Christopher Barker
<Chris.Barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> Gary Bernhardt wrote:
>
> > I want to split my app into multiple independent .apps, but I don't
> > want the user to have to care about that.
> >
>
>  I'm confused as to what you want. Do you want the user to have multiple app
> icons to click on? If not, then what are "independent .apps"?

Sorry, I was trying to keep it short by omitting my motivation.  It's
a backup app, so you don't want it taking up Dock space 24/7.  But
occasionally you want to browse your backups or change settings, at
which point you *do* want it in the Dock.  At least as of Tiger,
there's no way to switch the behavior back and forth like that with a
single app.

To get around this, I want to separate the app into two: one that just
has an icon in the status bar, and another one containing the full UI.
 Most of the time, only the status bar app is active, and it doesn't
show up in the Dock.  Occasionally the user will want to interact with
the app, so he'll hit one of the status bar item's menus and open it.
At that point the second app gets spawned, showing up in the Dock.

Since the full UI app is only spawned programmatically by the status
bar app, it doesn't need to have a user-visible icon.  So it's
independent in that it's a separate bundle, but it's only launched by
the main app.

> > I could just stick one app
> > inside another's Contents/Resources,
> >
>
>  but then the user would never see the inner .app -- what's the point?

-- 
Gary
http://blog.extracheese.org