Start and manage an Application.app's view from another cocoa app?

I'm in the situation where I love the Terminal.app of the mac, but I would love to add some further enhancements, like split views, terminal sets, etc.

Basically I tried to rebuild the Terminal.app with an NSTask/PseudoTTY approach which basically works but just doesn't feel and behave like the beloved Terminal.app itself. There's also no need to reinvent the wheel, I think.

So is there any approach to start an cocoa application (b) from another cocoa application (a) and manage the window or view of b from a? Like I have a ManageTerminals.app that start 6 Terminals and puts the views of them fullscreen in a grid, every instance being a fully working Terminal.app?

I found the SIMBL that basically allows to do something like that. At least the website says so. But there are no manuals or documentation available.

Does anybody have an idea how to accomplish this? I don't want to change an App, I just want to manage the size and appearance of the window/view on the screen.

Thanks for any ideas or concepts!

-- EDIT

I tried Apples ScriptingBridge now which almost does the job. There's just one little last step missing that might be a show stopper. Right now I have the following:

terminal = [SBApplication applicationWithBundleIdent开发者_开发知识库ifier:@"com.apple.Terminal"];
[terminal activate];

if([terminal isRunning]){
    TerminalWindow *terminalWindow = [[[terminal windows] get] objectAtIndex:0];
    view = (NSView*)[terminalWindow contentView];
}

Of course it's giving me an unrecognized selector, because there's no method to retrieve the view from the terminalWindow in the Terminal header. But if that was possible I could create x instances of my application and replug the view of the terminals to an own window that manages only the views.

Does someone know how to accomplish this, or do you think it's totally capsuled away?

You can launch an application with [[NSWorkspace sharedWorkspace] launchApplication:@"iChat"]. However you can't manage views. Youre only allowed to change the windows frame. AppleScript might help you here out. I've never used SIMBL before but theres a [wiki page][code.google.com/p/simbl/w/list]

You should probably take a look at iTerm which is an open-source terminal emulator for Mac OS X. You might be able to modify it to your needs, or at least see how a terminal emulator works via Cocoa.

Otherwise, you can use the Accessibility framework to control the position of other apps' windows. The user has to specifically allow this via the "Allow access for assistive devices" preference in the Accessibility pane of System Preferences.

Doing much more than that becomes more complex. Apple Events/AppleScript may give you the tools you need. I know Terminal has an AppleScript interface but I'm not sure how complete it is. I really don't recommend using SIMBL. This does allow you to inject your code into another app's memory space but since you would need to reverse engineer the other app you cannot guarantee stability.