You need to run a run loop in your thread. See: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Multithreading/RunLoopManagement/RunLoopManagement.html

Did you try QuickLook thumbnailing? I would have thought it would work. An alternative: -[NSWorkspace iconForFile:]

I tried Quinn's program once more under macOS 14.5 on my Intel-based Mac, and saw flowsw instead of 10 TCP sockets. So it appears that the difference is Sonoma versus Ventura.

Yes, the Mac App Store mandates sandboxing, but no, sandboxing does not prohibit Accessibility permission. In fact I have two apps in the Mac App Store that can request and use Accessibility permission.

I did the test again on a different Mac on the same local network, this time running macOS 14.5. And then I saw the flowsw thing instead of 10 TCP sockets. Another difference between the machines is that the one running Ventura has an Intel CPU, while the one with Sonoma is M1.

By the way, since the skywalkctl command was recommended here, I want to make a couple of comments about it. First, it can only be run using sudo. Second, the man page says you can get help on a command using skywalkctl COMMAND help, but that doesn't work.

I tried Quinn's test program, and I did see 10 TCP sockets. MacOS 13.6.7. I have iCloud+ but had Private Relay turned off. (Private Relay is part of iCloud+). No VPN.

The documentation of NSWorkspaceWillPowerOffNotification says To receive this notification, use notificationCenter to register for it. If you use a different notification center to register, you won’t receive the notification. That is, when you add the observer, you need to use NSWorkspace.notificationCenter instead of NotificationCenter.default.

In the first approach, do you see your imported certificate and private key under "My Certificates" in Keychain Access? Do you see your imported certificate in Xcode's Settings > Accounts when you click "Manage Certificates"?

When I grep the sample code project for vImagePiecewiseGamma_Planar8, I get no hits. So in what sense is your code a translation?

Is the array allocated on the heap (e.g., with malloc) or on the stack? In the latter case, you may be exceeding the available size of the stack.

I ran your file through plutil and it said Encountered unexpected character k on line 23 while looking for close tag That is, you're missing a left angle bracket in the string tag after CFBundleShortVersionString.

https://developer.apple.com/download/all/?q=xcode

Does your command line tool have an embedded Info.plist? I would guess that Accessibility access is recorded by bundle ID.

Quoting the NSUserDefaults documentation: Important Don’t try to access the preferences subsystem directly. Modifying preference property list files may result in loss of changes, delay of reflecting changes, and app crashes. To configure preferences, use the defaults command-line utility in macOS instead.