I am developing a CMIO Camera Extension on macOS Ventura.
Initially, I based this on the template camera extension (which creates its own frames). Later, I added a sink stream so that I could send the extension video from an app. That all works.
Recently, I added the ability for the extension itself to initiate a capture session, so that it can augment the video from any available AVCaptureDevice without running its controlling app. That works, but I have to add the Camera capability to the extension's sandbox configuration, and add a camera usage string.
This caused the OS to put up the user permission dialog, asking for permission to use the camera. However, the dialog uses the extension's bundle ID for its name, which is long and not user friendly. Furthermore, the extension isn't visible to the user (it is packaged inside the app which installs and controls it), so even a user-friendly name doesn't make that much sense to the end user.
I tried adding a CFBundleDisplayName to the extension's plist, but the OS didn't use it in the permissions dialog.
Is there a way to get the OS to present a more user-friendly name? Should I expect to see a permissions dialog pertaining to the extension at all? Where does the OS get the name from?
After the changes (Camera access, adding a camera usage string), I noticed that the extension's icon (the generic extension icon) showed up in the dock, with its name equal to its bundle ID.
Also, in Activity Monitor, the extension's process is displayed, using its CFBundleDisplayName (good). But about 30s after activation, the name is displayed in red, with " (not responding)" appended, although it is still working.
The extension does respond to the requests I send it over the CMIO interface, and it continues to process video, but it isn't handling user events, while the OS thinks that it should, probably because of one or more of the changes to the plist that I have had to make.
To get the icon out of the dock, I added LSUIElement=true to its plist. To get rid of the red "not responding", I changed the code in its main.swift from the template. It used to simply call CFRunLoopRun(). I commented out that call and instead make this call
_ = NSApplicationMain(CommandLine.argc, CommandLine.unsafeArgv)
That appears to work, but has the unfortunate side effect of increasing the CPU usage of the extension when it is idle from 0.3% to 1.0%.
I do want the extension to be able to process Intents, so there is a price to be paid for that. But it doesn't need to do so until it is actively dealing with video.
Is there a way to reduce the CPU usage of a background app, perhaps dynamically, making a tradeoff between CPU usage and response latency?
Is it to be expected that a CMIOExtension shows up in the Dock, ever?
