Hi Mark,
Ah, that does work, and seems to have worked for a number of other things I am trying to do.
The only problem now is when I have something like
value = Pointer.new '^v' # pointer to pointer to void AXUIElementCopyAttributeValue mail_object, 'AXHidden', value
In this case I am using it right now, it will be returning a boolean, but when I try to dereference it like
puts value[0][0] # => 120
it gives me a Fixnum, and then I can keep trying things like
puts value[0][1] # => 104 puts value[0][10000] # => 0
And I seem to get nowhere.
Is there a way to cast the data back into the type I want it to be? Or am I doing something dumb?
Looks like this function has the following declaration: extern AXError AXUIElementCopyAttributeValue (AXUIElementRef element, CFStringRef attribute, CFTypeRef *value); So, the 3rd argument is is a CF object returned by reference. You should be able to do the following then: ptr = Pointer.new(:id) AXUIElementCopyAttributeValue(mail_object, 'AXHidden', ptr) value = ptr[0] To reply to your other question, it is possible to cast the type of a Pointer object, using the #cast! method. Sometimes this is useful when you get a void pointer from a native API and want to cast it into something more useful. But you should be careful, MacRuby will not prevent you from doing bad casts. Laurent