My first post here (anywhere for that matter!), re. Cocoa/Obj-C (I'm NOT up to speed on either, please be patient!). I hope I haven't missed the answer already, I did try to find it.

I'm an old-school procedural dog (haven't done any programming since the mid 80's, so I probably just can't even learn new tricks), but OOP has my head spinning! My question is:

is there any means at all to "discover/find/identify" an instance of an object of a known class, given that some OTHER unknown process instantiated it?

eg. somthing that would accomplish this scenario:

(id) anObj = [someTarget getMostRecentInstanceOf:[aKnownClass class]];

for that matter, "getAnyInstance" or "getAllInstances" might do the trick too.

Background: I'm trying to write a plugin for a commercial application, so much of the heavy lifting is being done by the app, behind the scenes.

I have the SDK & header files, I know what class the object is, and what method I need to call (it has only instance methods), I just can't identify the object for targetting.

I've spent untold hours and days going over Apples documentation, tutorials and lots of example/sample code on the web (including here at Stack Overflow), and come up empty. Seems that everything requires a known target object to work, and I just don't have one.

Since I may not be expressing my problem as clearly as needed, I've put up a web page, with diagram & working sample pages to illustrate:

http://www.nulltime.com/svtest/index.html

Any help or guidance will be appreciated! Thanks.