Make Swift Cocoa app launch on startup on OS X 10.11

Question

I need to write a function that adds my application to Startup items on OS X 10.11. That\'s what I found at the moment:

func applicationIsInStartUpItems() ->          


        

Answer 1

In Swift 3.0 it looks like this:

In your main application AppDelegate:

func applicationDidFinishLaunching(_ aNotification: Notification) {
    // Check if the launcher app is started
    var startedAtLogin = false
    for app in NSWorkspace.shared().runningApplications {
        if app.bundleIdentifier == NCConstants.launcherApplicationIdentifier {
            startedAtLogin = true
        }
    }

    // If the app's started, post to the notification center to kill the launcher app
    if startedAtLogin {
        DistributedNotificationCenter.default().postNotificationName(NCConstants.KILLME, object: Bundle.main.bundleIdentifier, userInfo: nil, options: DistributedNotificationCenter.Options.deliverImmediately)
    }
}

In the Launcher application AppDelegate:

func applicationDidFinishLaunching(_ aNotification: Notification) {

    let mainAppIdentifier = "<main-app-bundle-id>"
    let running = NSWorkspace.shared().runningApplications
    var alreadyRunning = false

    // loop through running apps - check if the Main application is running
    for app in running {
        if app.bundleIdentifier == mainAppIdentifier {
            alreadyRunning = true
            break
        }
    }

    if !alreadyRunning {
        // Register for the notification killme
        DistributedNotificationCenter.default().addObserver(self, selector: #selector(self.terminate), name: NCConstants.KILLME, object: mainAppIdentifier)

        // Get the path of the current app and navigate through them to find the Main Application
        let path = Bundle.main.bundlePath as NSString
        var components = path.pathComponents
        components.removeLast(3)
        components.append("MacOS")
        components.append("<your-app-name>")

        let newPath = NSString.path(withComponents: components)

        // Launch the Main application
        NSWorkspace.shared().launchApplication(newPath)
    }
    else {
        // Main application is already running
        self.terminate()
    }

}

func terminate() {
    print("Terminate application")
    NSApp.terminate(nil)
}

Eventually, in the main application I added a user interface with a toggle button. The user can choose to launch the app at login or not. The choice is stored into the UserDefaults. In the View Controller:

@IBAction func toggleLaunchAtLogin(_ sender: Any) {
    if toggleOpenAppLogin.selectedSegment == 0 {
        if !SMLoginItemSetEnabled(NCConstants.launcherApplicationIdentifier as CFString, true) {
            print("The login item was not successfull")
            toggleOpenAppLogin.setSelected(true, forSegment: 1)
        }
        else {
            UserDefaults.standard.set("true", forKey: "appLoginStart")
        }
    }
    else {
        if !SMLoginItemSetEnabled(NCConstants.launcherApplicationIdentifier as CFString, false) {
            print("The login item was not successfull")
            toggleOpenAppLogin.setSelected(true, forSegment: 0)
        }
        else {
            UserDefaults.standard.set("false", forKey: "appLoginStart")
        }
    }

}

I hope this can help somebody.

Answer 2

You have to use the Service Management framework now. You create a helper application that you add to your application bundle and its job is to run code to launch your main application. Some resources for you:

• Tim Schröder has an excellent blog post on how this is done
• Alex Zielenski has an open source project to aid with this
• I've made a video tutorial on creating it manually