I'm passionate on both Mac and Eclipse. Although Eclipse runs well on a Mac, its not a marriage made in heaven. Its really hard to get the complete Mac experience with a portable UI tool kit. If you think of features like this one, its actually endless list. One such thing is the badge on the Dock Icon. In Mac, the Dock icon can have a badge - like the number of unread mails in your inbox. How much effort does it takes to add a badge to our RCP mail sample? Not much. Since SWT doesn't have a NSDockTile, we need a NSDockTile class with two methods, one to get the DockTile for the application and the other to set the badge on it (there is an easier way by using the Mac Generator tool, but that will be a patch to SWT itself, which I wanted to avoid):

/**
 * @author Prakash G.R. (grprakash@gmail.com) 
 * 
 */
@SuppressWarnings("restriction")
public class NSDockTile extends NSResponder {

 private static final int sel_setBadgeLabel_ = OS.sel_registerName("setBadgeLabel:");
 private static final int sel_dockTile_ = OS.sel_registerName("dockTile");
 private static final int sel_display_ = OS.sel_registerName("display");

 public NSDockTile(int id) {
  super(id);
 }

 public static NSDockTile getApplicationDockTile() {
  NSApplication sharedApplication = NSApplication.sharedApplication();
  int id = OS.objc_msgSend(sharedApplication.id, sel_dockTile_);
  NSDockTile dockTile = new NSDockTile(id);
  return dockTile;
 }

 public void setBadgeLabel(String badgeLabel) {
   NSString nsBadgeLabel = NSString.stringWith(badgeLabel);
   OS.objc_msgSend(this.id, sel_setBadgeLabel_, nsBadgeLabel.id);
   OS.objc_msgSend(this.id, sel_display_);
 }
}

And a two line code to set the badge:

NSDockTile nsDockTile = NSDockTile.getApplicationDockTile();
nsDockTile.setBadgeLabel("6");

There you go in the dock icon and in the minimized window:

In case you were wondering how the GMail icon for the application is set, here is the code for that:

ImageDescriptor imageDescriptor = ImageDescriptor.createFromURL(iconUrl);
Image image = imageDescriptor.createImage();
NSApplication app = NSApplication.sharedApplication();
app.setApplicationIconImage(image.handle);

 Oh, BTW, I've just started learning Objective C, Cocoa & related things. So stay tuned, you will see more Mac related posts here. Also what is your favourite Mac feature that you are missing in Eclipse?

From http://blog.eclipse-tips.com/