[mxcantor]

First of all, I'm sorry to keep asking such newbie questions to this bb, but I dont really know any other good resources aside from apple's API documentation, so if someone could point me to them, i'd be quite grateful.

So, what method of what class does one need to call to get a reference to all running apps and specifically, the foremost running app?

thank you,
Max

[Dalgo]

I think that Apple lacks an API to do that. I guess that your next best thing would be to figure out how something like top, in Unix, gets it's list of running processes and then you can try to figure out a way to eliminate everything that isn't a running app with a representation in the GUI. For example, all carbon apps seem to be represented by CFApp or something like that in the process manager.

I'm sure that there is some place where it keeps track of running apps because where else would the window that pops up when you hit apple control escape get it's list of running apps. In the meantime top is opensource under the GPL so you could take a look.