How to detect presence of another application?

Try -[NSWorkspace URLForApplicationWithBundleIdentifier:] and pass in the bundle identifier of the application found in its Info.plist file.

 

I don't see anything. "system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType -xml" with NSTask might be your best option.

EDIT: I just ran system_profiler in the debugger and it appears they're using the Spotlight API to find apps, which makes sense. Check out NSMetadataQuery.

 

Not quite as clever, but you could always just grep through the output from "ls /Applications"

 

Some of us use ~/Applications as well . And a lot of people I know who don't really know much about computers put applications all over the place, like their Desktop (!).

 

Also:

Code:

locate lsregister

And try running it with the -dump option.

More info can be found by googling lsregister.

 

And some of us who do know what we are doing place applications in other places.

 

Me for example. Sometimes I leave applications inside the downloads folder #epicfail

 

You could always ask 'system_profiler' to gather the information for you thru the use of 'popen'.

man system_profiler
system_profiler -listDataTypes

'system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType' will give you a list of "Applications" that are installed on the computer. Looking thru the list of information types you can probably come up with other software types you'd like to know about.

Edit:
If you're looking for running applications the Process Manager API still works although not for BSD daemons you'd need to use the ''stat' (I think, to early for me) function.

 

Use Spotlight

You should be able to use Spotlight's API to see if a particular program is on the system. You can create a query and then search through the results.

I haven't done this, but the above approach seems the most logical. Here is the link to Apple's developer site.

 

I used gdb through Xcode (New Project > Empty Project > Add New Custom Executable).