nspasteboard

I'm having a really difficult time trying to get NSPasteboard to work, so forgive me for my lack of understanding. All I want is a simple way to write and retrieve from the pasteboard a NSUInteger value that is only for my application. All I am doing is drag dropping an item within my application, so all I need in the pasteboard is the item's id. I have tried looking into NSPasteboardItemDataProvider and NSPasteboardItem, and NSData, but they all have convoluted way of doing something so simple. Infact, I have no idea what is the correct way of doing something so simple - every sample around

I've read Apple's Pasteboard Programming Guide , but it doesn't answer a particular question I have. I'm trying to write a Cocoa application (for OS X, not iOS) that will keep track of everything that is written to the general pasteboard (so, whenever any application copies and pastes, but not, say, drags-and-drops, which also makes use of NSPasteboard). I could (almost) accomplish this by basically polling the general pasteboard on a background thread constantly, and checking changeCount . Of course, doing this would make me feel very dirty on the inside. My question is, is there a way to ask