I'm writing an application for Mac OS X 10.6 and later in C++. One part of the application needs to simulate mouse movement and mouse clicks. I do this currently by posting CGEvent objects using CGEventPost(kCGHIDEventTap, event);.

This works, for the most part - I can simulate mouse movement and clicks just fine, but it seems to fail in some areas. For example:

• In Mozilla Firefox and Safari, I can click on all the menus, but cannot click on a link within a website. When I try, the link is highlighted, but the browser never follows the link. However, I can right-click on a link, select "open link in new tab", and everything works as expected. Solved - creating the mouse event using CGEventCreateMouseEvent(...) makes the event work within web browser.
• I can click on the "Dashboard" icon to brink up the dashboard, but I cannot click on the "i" button on any of the dashboard widgets. Similarly, clicking on any of the search results from the spotlight search widget doesn't work either.

This inconsistency is along application boundaries. What might be the cause?