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What are my options, if any, of adding additional, arbitrary data to the standard Cocoa about dialog that is displayed by an NSApplication when it receives a orderFrontStandardAboutPanel message.

anthony
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  • You could wire the menu item to a custom action in -say- your app delegate and, from there, present your very own, fully customized window. You can read all the text info from your app's plist and obtain the icon image from `NSApp`. – Nicolas Miari Feb 11 '16 at 11:05

4 Answers4

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If you add a file named Credits.rtf to Resources the contents will automatically be used in the expanded standard about panel and you can put whatever info you want in the file. It will still pull the standard copyright, version info, etc from the info.plist. It is the easiest way I know of to add arbitrary info, otherwise you pretty much will have to roll your own about panel.

theMikeSwan
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    If anyone (like me) just spend 10 seconds looking for that, now this group is called 'Supporting Files'... – Atomix Apr 05 '15 at 17:22
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-[NSApplication orderFrontStandardAboutPanelWithOptions:]

Dave DeLong
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  • ah, I'm already using all of those options to show appropriate information for each dict key (pulled from the app bundle). The question is how can I show information in addition to all of that? – anthony May 20 '10 at 22:34
  • @Anthony either shoehorn your information into the Credits (or similar strategy) or make your own About window. – Dave DeLong May 20 '10 at 22:36
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Expanding further on the answers from Darrell Root and theMikeSwan above, Apple's documentation for the credits property of NSApplication.AboutPanelOptionKey states:-

The value of this key is an NSAttributedString displayed in the info area of the panel. If not specified, AppKit then looks for a file named “Credits.html”, “Credits.rtf”, and “Credits.rtfd”, in that order, in the bundle returned by the Bundle class method main. The first file found is used. If none is found, the info area is left blank.

arcdale
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Expanding on theMikeSwan's answer, by accident I found that if you add a file named Credits.html to the Resources folder, it's contents get used in the expanded standard about panel. In fact Credits.html appears to override a Credits.rtf.

So your choice whether to use html or rtf format, or wire up "About" to a completely different custom window controller.

Darrell Root
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