Address Book plug-in
I recently learned about an Address Book plug-in for Mac OS X that allowed users to check directions using Google Maps. You can download it from www.briantoth.com. What I found interesting was the fact that the Address Book could be extended. I decided to take a look at what could be achieved and I quickly created a plug-in that displays URLs in a drawer. It is amazing how deep you can get inside an existing cocoa application and modify it’s behaviour without breaking it.
It turns out that there are many ways to extend an existing application, proof-of-it is an excellent plug-in for Safari called SafariStand. This product is very interesting because it extends a product that was not even designed to be exteded through the InputManager extension mechanism.
There are many tools that help developers extend existing applications. I have started by using class-dump, a command-line application that will give you detailed information of all the existing classes and methods within it. If you are interested by this topic take a look at this page which contains a lot of useful information.
Well, I plan to continue to work on my plug-in to learn more about how all of this works and what the security implications are. If I feel that my plug-in can be useful, I will release it. I will let you know!