How do I draw a badge on my Dock icon using Cocoa?

Question

How do I add a badge to the Dock icon for my app using Cocoa? Is there any roughly \"standardized\" way to do this?

(I\'m referring to the kind of badges that show up i

Answer 1

A quick google search turned up the NSDockTile class. Seems pretty self-explanatory once you take a gander at the documentation.

Answer 2

It should be noted that NSDockTile is only available on Leopard. If you need to target Tiger you'll need to use -setApplicationIconImage: on your NSApplication object and draw your badge by hand.

Also, it's not in the documentation outside of the release notes that I could find but you get your application's dock tile by sending the dockTile message to your NSApplication object.

NSDockTile *tile = [[NSApplication sharedApplication] dockTile];
[tile setBadgeLabel:@"Lots"];

Answer 3

Use

 [[[NSApplication sharedApplication] dockTile] setBadgeLabel:@"2234"];

This method, and the NSDockTile class, has been available since Leopard.