ComplimentKit

So you're interested in integrating Compliment support. Great!

Sorry to let you down, but there's no .m files here. Nor is there an Xcode project or even a precompiled .framework.

Turns out it's so easy to integrate Compliment that such things are overkill.

All you need to do is send a distributed notification, like so:

- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(NSNotification*)aNotification {
    NSDictionary *complimentRequestDictionary = @{
        @"name": @"MarkdownLive", // required
        @"url": @"https://github.com/rentzsch/markdownlive", // required
        @"path": [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath], // suggested but optional
        @"icon": [[NSImage imageNamed:NSImageNameApplicationIcon] TIFFRepresentation], // suggested but optional
    };
    [[NSDistributedNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotificationName:@"ComplimentRequest"
                                                                   object:[complimentRequestDictionary description]
                                                                 userInfo:nil
                                                                  options:NSNotificationDeliverImmediately];
}

Copy-and-paste away! The two important bits to get right is your app's name (MarkdownLive in the example) and your app's Flattr-registered URL (https://github.com/rentzsch/markdownlive in the example). The rest is boilerplate.

Once in place, your app will post a Compliment request every time it's launched. Don't worry too much about requesting Compliments too often -- Flattr only allows flattring a thing once per month (though Compliment keeps request logs, so you don't want to ask for a compliment once per second or anything silly like that).

One point of oddity in the above code is that we avoid the seemingly-fine userInfo and instead pass the request dictionary as a serialized ASCII plist. Unfortunately sandboxed apps are disallowed from sending distributed notifications with userInfos, so this is our work-around.

To keep things simple, we completely ignore userInfo, so don't use it, even in situations you could.

Subrequests

Does your app make use of an open-source project? It's easy to have your users automatically Flattr those projects along with your app.

Just add a subrequests array to your ComplimentRequest like so:

- (void)applicationDidFinishLaunching:(NSNotification*)aNotification {
    NSDictionary *complimentRequestDictionary = @{
        @"name": @"MarkdownLive", // required
        @"url": @"https://github.com/rentzsch/markdownlive", // required
        @"path": [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath], // suggested but optional
        @"icon": [[NSImage imageNamed:NSImageNameApplicationIcon] TIFFRepresentation], // suggested but optional
        @"subrequests": @[
            @{
                @"name": @"Discount",
                @"url": @"https://github.com/Orc/discount",
            },
            @{
                @"name": @"Sparkle",
                @"url": @"https://github.com/andymatuschak/Sparkle"
            },
        ]
    };
    [[NSDistributedNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotificationName:@"ComplimentRequest"
                                                                   object:[complimentRequestDictionary description]
                                                                 userInfo:nil
                                                                  options:NSNotificationDeliverImmediately];
}

Notice you don't supply a path or an icon for subrequests.

Scripting with Python

You can also create the ComplimentRequest notifications with a simple Python script.

from Foundation import *

data = { 'name': 'MarkdownLive',
     'url' : 'https://github.com/rentzsch/markdownlive'
}

nc = Foundation.NSDistributedNotificationCenter.defaultCenter()

nc.postNotificationName_object_userInfo_options_(
  "ComplimentRequest", NSDictionary.dictionaryWithDictionary_(data).description(), None,
  NSNotificationDeliverImmediately);