[Pythonmac-SIG] ANN: LaunchServices 0.1 - Pythonic wrapper for the Launch Services API

[Bob Ippolito]

Have you ever tried to figure out how to find an application by its 
creator signature?  Or the editor/viewer of a particular file type?  
The "user interface names" for paths?

Well, I figured it out.  Apple's API to do it is called Launch Services 
(part of ApplicationServices.framework).  It doesn't have a whole lot 
of documentation, but reading the header file was sufficient.  I 
developed a Pyrex wrapper around it, leveraging the (meager and buggy 
:)) CoreFoundation support that comes stock with Python 2.3.  I'm 
basically using this as a way to make the application-finding code for 
aeve sane.  A new version of aeve should be coming sometime in the next 
two weeks or so.

Example usage:

 >>> import LaunchServices as LS
 >>> LS.GetDisplayNameForPath('/')
u'Crack'
 >>> LS.GetKindStringForPath('/')
u'Volume'
 >>> LS.GetApplicationPathForInfo(extension='mp3')
u'/Applications/iTunes.app'
 >>> LS.GetApplicationPathForInfo(creator='MACS')
u'/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app'
 >>> LS.FindApplicationPath(bundle='com.apple.iChat')
u'/Applications/iChat.app'

I'm sure somone will find this useful.  I made sure everything has doc 
strings, and it's fully tested (in normal use, not for memory leaks 
yet) against Jack's Python 2.3 (#2, Jul 30 2003, 11:45:28).

homepage:
	http://undefined.org/python/

pydoc documentation:
	http://undefined.org/python/LaunchServices-0.1-pydoc.html

source tarball:
	http://undefined.org/python/LaunchServices-0.1.tar.gz

PackageManager URL (Python 2.3 - 10.2.x):
	http://undefined.org/python/pimp/darwin-6.6-Power_Macintosh.plist

-bob