So, it’s been some time since I promised a little Cocoa wrapper around the (private) TimeMachine client API, as used by such applications as Mail, Address Book, and iPhoto. What with one thing and another, I never got around to expanding the example code to do everything I wanted (such as pulling individual items out of a backed up data file for re-importing, similar to Address Book), but such as it is, here’s what I have right now.

Download the example code

The complete (2560×1600) screenshot

The source code is, needless to say, Leopard-only, and the Time Machine helper class uses ObjC 2.0 features such as properties and @optional protocol specifications.

The archive above contains the project, based upon Jon ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch’s CoreData tutorial. This was done purely as a time-saving measure, since this tutorial resulted in a small app with a single data store containing a bunch of separate data objects.

Yeah, okay, I was just too lazy to write my own.

The archive also contains a PDF version of a talk I gave on this subject for the Toronto CocoaHeads group. This PDF is available separately here. Once I’ve got the code cleaned up a bit and released, via Google code or my own repository, should I ever finish writing that (I said I’d been busy, didn’t I?) then I’ll rearrange that a bit & do a screencast similar to the ADC/WWDC ones.

For now, enjoy, and ping me via the comments for more information.