How can I make a GUI frontend to a command line tool in OSX?

Question

I'm dying to know how I can make a GUI for ffmpeg and jhead in OSX. I've been looking for a solution for a while and thought you, stackoverflow's users, could help me. Maybe you know some document I haven't come across of or, better, a tutorial to make a GUI.

I love those two tools but I like the simplicity of drag/drop operations.

Note: I don't need a GUI for them, I want to make one.

Answer 1

There is a tutorial for wrapping command-line tools using NSTask, on the Cocoa Dev Central site:

• Wrapping UNIX Commands
• Wrapping UNIX Commands Part II

It's a few years old now, but should get you started.

Answer 2

If you are asking "How do I create a GUI application in Mac OS X that interfaces to a command line tool" the answer is NSTask. Although, if the command line tool provides a programming API, using that would be preferable to invoking the command line tool itself.

If you are asking "How do I create a GUI application in Mac OS X" the answer is to read a book about it and look at the Apple tutorial docs. Cocoa Programming on Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass was my starting point.