[Apago]

Is there any information about developing plugins for iPhoto?

[amonitzer]

Somebody from OmniGroup has written a plugin by reverse-engineering the protocol (it's all Objective C). Head over to the macosx-dev mailing list archive.

[ruttopia]

Is Apple going to eventually release an API for it like they did iTunes? I already (as I'm sure others do) have lots of little ideas for add-on's that would be really nice ... Hmm ...

[amonitzer]

Well, you can be sure that nobody here is able to answer that question, only time will tell.

[Rickster]

Some consider it a blessing, some a curse -- in order for the Objective-C runtime to work properly, a lot if information is left in a binary that you won't find in a statically bound language. And this information can be used to reconstruct almost everything you need to make use of classes, categories, and methods defined in the binary.

Omni's iPhoto wild-man Greg figured out everything needed to write the plugin using class-dump (which, coincidentally, is maintained by another Omni engineer). Fully fleshing out the UI niceties involved also using the <font face = "courier">otool</font> command-line utility that's part of the developer tools.

Cocoa rawks.