[VanToffler]

Does anybody know of some example code where you can sit and watch/intercept events from the application in the foreground? I knew how to do this in OS 9, no idea where to start in OS X.

[aleph_null]

not sure if this is quite what you meant, but on the Carbon tips and tricks page, there's this tip:

What CarbonEvent gets sent when?
If you want to see the Carbon Events that are sent to your app at runtime (on Mac OS X), you can issue the following commands via Terminal:

% setenv EventDebug 1
% LaunchCFMApp <pathToYourApplication> | grep -v "kEventMouseDown"
The "grep -v" is for events you don't want to see.

the LaunchCFM bit is, of course, only used if your app is PEF.

you can also install Carbon event handlers on whichever events you're interested in, have the handler print the events out somewhere, and then let the event "fall through". this will work even if your app is WNE-based. have your handler return kEventNotHandledErr and the event will show up in your poll loop as it always has.

was this sort of what you had in mind?