Question

I thought I would post a question and answer regarding continuously tracking the mouse location in cocoa ( in OSX 10.5.8 using xcode 3.1.4) within a cocoa app.

It is a self answer question because I finally figured it out and couldn’t find an answer here that I thought described how I managed to solve it

And possibly some people might think its easier than using event taps plus without the masking features in 10.6 this is pretty easy 🙂

Answer 1

heres how I did it.

First of all this is the code I used to set up the tracking area :

NSTrackingArea* trackingArea = [ [ NSTrackingArea alloc] initWithRect:[ mainWindow frame]       options:(NSTrackingMouseMoved | NSTrackingActiveAlways ) owner:self userInfo:nil);

[container addTrackingArea:trackingArea];

When I create the main window I add this message while i’m setting everything up :

 [window setAcceptsMouseMovedEvents:YES];

and in the header file for the class that I want to catch the event (which for me is in the same class as I created the tracking area ) I subclass NSResponder and then implement the event I want to catch which for me is mouseMoved.

-(void) mouseMoved: (NSEvent *) thisEvent
{
  NSPoint cursorPoint = [ thisEvent locationInWindow ];
  NSLog(@"X coordinate is %f and Y coordinate is %f",cursorPoint.x,cursorPoint.y);
}

Hope this is of some help 🙂

Thanks!