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This will probably come across as a naive question, but is there anyway possible for one application to have access to an NSView object belonging to another application and draw on it (via IPC or otherwise)?

Peter Jacobs
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  • possible duplicate of [Mac OS X: Can one process render to another process's window?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/583202/mac-os-x-can-one-process-render-to-another-processs-window) – Georg Fritzsche Jan 14 '12 at 01:31

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Yes. That's exactly what the IOSurface framework is for. A good example of its use is Safari in Lion, which has a rendering process that is separate to the HTML parsing process.

There's a good article about it here.

Note that if your app is in a Sandbox that you can't use IPC to communicate with an app outside your app's sandbox, but you can communicate with helper tools inside the sandbox.

Rob Keniger
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  • Not sure yet whether or not IOSurface will work for me. I'm using a third party library to which I hand an NSView, and it does all the rendering of video captured from a camera for me. I just want it be able to render to an NSView in another process. So I will somehow need to extract the graphic data from one NSView and send it to the other process's NSView. – Peter Jacobs Jan 19 '12 at 12:08