Simulating mouse clicks on Mac OS X does not work for some applications

Question

I\'m writing an application for Mac OS X 10.6 and later in C++. One part of the application needs to simulate mouse movement and mouse clicks. I do this currently by posting

Answer 1

I have written how to do it in the blog post Python Mouse Click and Move Mouse on Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.x.

Answer 2

Use OSXVnc. I see they use CGPostMouseEvent() instead of CGPostEvent().

Answer 3

What you need to do to convince these applications that you have in fact generated a click is to explicitly set the value of the "click state" field on the mouse up event to 1 (it defaults to 0). The following code will do it:

CGEventSetIntegerValueField(event, kCGMouseEventClickState, 1);

It also has to be set to 1 for the mouse down, but by using CGEventCreateMouseEvent() rather than CGEventCreate() that gets done for you.

I have tested this and it works in the 'i' buttons in the dashboard and the Spotlight search results.

(As an aside, if you were simulating a double click you would need to set the click state to 2 for both the mouse down and mouse up events of the second click.)

Answer 4

Most menus are activated with the mouseDown event. Hyperlinks are followed after the mouseUp event. The "i" button only works when the mouse has been clicked but not a long time. All this seem to show that you have a timing problem, try several pressed timing.