ThreadWorker is a class makes it easy to offload a task to another thread and notify your application when you’ve completed the task. Creating multithreaded applications with ThreadWorker it’s easier than Objective-C in Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework raw code.

Calling ThreadWorker looks something like this:

[ThreadWorker workOn:self
                  withSelector:@selector(longTask:)
                  withArgument:someData
                  didEndTarget:self
                  didEndSelector:@selector(longTaskFinished:)];

In this case, longTask would be run in another thread, and longTaskFinished would be called on the original calling thread when longTask is finished.

Download example XCode Proj + API Documentation

ThreadWorker was release under Public Domain!

It’s pretty easy adding growl notifications to your app. Download the SDK from growl.info. Set up your Xcode project to copy the Growl.framework into your application bundle.

Pick a class to be the contact point with Growl. Your AppController class is a good place. Import

Set the delegate to the GrowlApplicationBridge:

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    [GrowlApplicationBridge setGrowlDelegate: self];

Doing this will eventually have the registrationDictionaryForGrowl delegate message called. Return a dictionary with two arrays (Which can be the same). These are the names of the alerts you will be posting. These are human-readable, so you’ll want to use a localized string (which I’ve already set in the global variable here:

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- (NSDictionary *) registrationDictionaryForGrowl
{
    NSArray *notifications;
    notifications = [NSArray arrayWithObject: g_timesUpString];
 
    NSDictionary *dict;
 
    dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
                             notifications, GROWL_NOTIFICATIONS_ALL,
                         notifications, GROWL_NOTIFICATIONS_DEFAULT, nil];
 
    return (dict);
 
} // registrationDictionaryForGrowl

And use this to post a notification:

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[GrowlApplicationBridge notifyWithTitle: @"Woop!  Time has expired!"
                        description: @"You have been waiting for 37 minutes"
                        notificationName: g_timesUpString
                        iconData: nil
                        priority: 0
                        isSticky: NO
                        clickContext: nil];

Consult the SDK documentation for more explanations of the features, but they are pretty self-explanitory.

NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains is how you find the location of things like Library directories, or User directories, and the like (this is the NSSearchPathDirectory). The NSSearchPathDomainMask is what domains to find things in. For instance for a NSLibraryDirectory, a NSUserDomainMask will give you the path to ~/Library, NSSystemDomainMask will give you the path to /System/Library, and so on.

The directories inside of Library, like “Preferences” and “Application Support” are in English in the file system, and the Finder presents localized versions to the user. If you need ~/Library/Application Support/Borkware, you can construct it like

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   NSMutableString *path;
    path = [[NSMutableString alloc] init];
 
    // find /User/user-name/Library
    NSArray *directories;
    directories = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains (NSLibraryDirectory,
                                                       NSUserDomainMask, YES);
 
    // if you had more than one user domain, you would walk directories and
    // work with each path
    [path appendString: [directories objectAtIndex: 0]];
 
    [path appendString: @"/Application Support"];
    [path appendString: @"/Borkware"];

As for the curent user’s name:

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NSUserName() or NSFullUserName()