The Mysteries of iCal, Revealed!

Note: As of Snow Leopard, this functionality has been superseded by an official Dock tile plug-in mechanism.

One of the minor yet shiny new features of Mac OS X 10.5 is that iCal’s dock icon now shows the correct date even when iCal is not running. Some assumed this to be hard-coded functionality in the dock, but a few brave souls – well, one, being me – decided to find out.The following lines in iCal’s Info.plist are a bit of a hint:

<key>DockExtra</key>
<string>iCalDockExtra.bundle</string>

iCalDockExtra.bundle can be found in iCal’s Resources directory. 90 seconds with class-dump, otool, and class-dump again show that the bundle implements a subclass of DockExtra, which in turn is defined in the private SystemUIPlugin.framework.

Having retrieved the interface declaration for the DockExtra class from class-dump, it is a simple matter to implement a subclass which logs which methods are called and when. As it turns out, the only ones called are -_initWithController: and -dealloc, but through the power of my mighty brain I worked out that I could draw the dock icon whenever I wished, using -getContext: to get a drawing context and size, -setDockImageFromContext to update the image in the dock and -releaseContext to clean up afterwards.

And that’s pretty much it. Code is here. Read the Read Me first. (The most important caveat is that the bundle is never unloaded while SystemUIServer is running.) If someone actually uses this for something useful, please tell me about it.

Edit: I thought I’d said this earlier, but apparently not: as pointed out in the comments, Alacatia Labs published the same information a week before me, and did a slightly better job too. If I had used the power of the intergoogles, I would have known that, but then I’d have missed the fun of working it out.

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Published:
20:51 on 2007-11-09
Category:
Cocoa, Code