<p>How can I read the status of the battery on my MacBookPro from my own application?</p>

<p>Googling has so far only revealed APIs for device drivers to handle power events - there's nothing about user-land processes accessing this information.</p>

<p>thanks.</p>

You'll want to use IOKit for this, specifically the
IOPowerSources functions
.  You can use
```
IOPSCopyPowerSourcesInfo()
```
to get a blob, and
```
IOPSCopyPowerSourcesList()
```
to then extract a CFArray out of that, listing the power sources. Then use
```
IOPSGetPowerSourceDescription()
```
to pull out a dictionary (see
IOPSKeys.h
for the contents of the dictionary).