How to implement a Cocoa-based Adobe Photoshop plugin

Question

Cocoa used to work on CS3 with the trick of putting a Cocoa bundle inside the main Carbon plugin bundle, loading it from Carbon and issuing a NSApplicationLoad(). That\'s becaus

Answer 1

You have to create a new Loadable Bundle target that contains your nibs and your Cocoa code. Add the bundle product to the Copy Bundle Resources phase of your plugin. Then the code for a filter plugin that loads a Cocoa window with some controls would be:

Boolean DoUI (void) {

    // Create the CF Cocoa bundle
    CFBundleRef pluginBundle;
    CFURLRef cocoaBundleURL;
    pluginBundle = CFBundleGetBundleWithIdentifier(CFSTR("com.example.plugin"));
    cocoaBundleURL = CFBundleCopyResourceURL(pluginBundle, 
                                             CFSTR("Cocoa_bundle"), 
                                             CFSTR("bundle"), 
                                             NULL);
    CFBundleRef cocoaBundleRef;
    cocoaBundleRef = CFBundleCreate(kCFAllocatorDefault, cocoaBundleURL);
    CFRelease(cocoaBundleURL);

    // start Cocoa (for CS3)
    NSApplicationLoad(); 

    NSAutoreleasePool* pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

    // load the cocoa bundle by identifier
    NSBundle* cocoaBundle;
    cocoaBundle = [NSBundle bundleWithIdentifier:@"com.example.plugin.cocoa"];

    // load the window controller from the bundle
    Class testControllerClass;
    testControllerClass = [cocoaBundle classNamed:@"MyWindowController"];

    MyWindowController* winController = [[testControllerClass alloc] init];
    [NSApp runModalForWindow:[winController window]];
    [[winController window] performClose:nil];
    [winController release];

    // release the bundle
    CFRelease(cocoaBundleRef);

    [pool release];

    return 1;
}

This is based on the Craig Hockenberry bundle trick. I'm still testing it but it should work both on CS3 and CS4.