alt Hacker News>background computer use
How does that even work technically? macOS doesn't support multiple cursors. On native Cocoa apps you can pass input to a window without raising via command+click so possibly they synthesized those events, but fewer and fewer apps support that these days. And AppleScript is basically dead, so they can't be using that either.
I also read they acquired the Sky team (who I think were former Apple employees). No wonder they were able to pull of something so slick.
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chrisstanchak • yesterday at 9:37 PM
Citrix
/s
I remember looking trying to build something like this 6 years ago[0]. There are some interesting APIs for injecting click/keystroke events directly into Cocoa, and other APIs for reading framebuffers for apps that aren't in the foreground.
In particular there was some prior art that I found for doing it from the OpenQwaQ project, which was a GPLv2 3D virtual world project in Squeak/Smalltalk started by Alan Kay[1] back in 2011.
If I recall correctly, it worked well for native apps, but didn't work well for Chromium/Electron apps because they would use an API for grabbing the global mouse position rather than reading coordinates from events.
[0]: https://github.com/antimatter15/microtask/blob/master/cocoa/... [1]: https://github.com/OpenFora/openqwaq/blob/189d6b0da1fb136118...