Writing Background Applications in Cocoa
I couldn’t find a good tutorial on how to do this, so here are the steps necessary to make a Cocoa app run exclusively in the background (ala Dropbox, Google Notifier, etc):
Add ‘Application is background only’ to your Info.plist. You can either find it in the drop down box for adding a row, or use ‘LSBackgroundOnly’ as the new row value. (You can read more about the various Launch Services here).
Create a controller object which will manage the status bar item and menu. You can, for example, instantiate this controller in your applicationDidFinishLaunching: method.
A simple example:
