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VEGAN · Aug 30, 2002, 04:04 AM

I was wondering if docklings still work?

Anyone knows? I think they were neat for some very simple repetitive tasks.

lenz · Aug 30, 2002, 04:16 AM

well they've either killed them or made a complete resign of the APIs because I wasn't able to find a single dockling that actually worked in 10.2. I'll check out the release notes and updated cocoa documentation tomorrow (if no else does by then)

VEGAN · Aug 30, 2002, 04:31 AM

Originally posted by lenz:
well they've either killed them or made a complete resign of the APIs because I wasn't able to find a single dockling that actually worked in 10.2. I'll check out the release notes and updated cocoa documentation tomorrow (if no else does by then)

I'll be waiting

Ibson · Aug 30, 2002, 04:47 AM

The Dockling API has always been private. 10.1 reduced support for them; 10.2 has totally removed it. From Apple's point-of-view, dockings have been dead since Puma. Now with Jaguar, they've proven it.

VEGAN · Aug 30, 2002, 05:00 AM

That's a bummer!
Why isn't Apple listening? I reckon many if not most thought that docklings were a good idea...

Ibson · Aug 30, 2002, 05:14 AM

I think Apple realized that the Dock couldn't try to be everything in one�control strip, launcher, Apple Menu, whatever. Have a suttle AirPort monitor, volume control, battery indicator and clock in my menu bar is much cleaner than having gigantic icons in my dock�my Docks for applications and documents, not system functions. Also, there was a lot of redunancy introduced with docklings. For example, in 10.0, you'd have iTunes in your dock and also an iTunes docking. The same thing with Audion. That sort of redunancy is just silly,

Apple told us that docklings (like Massinova's one) should be replaced by running a stand-alone application with a dock menu. This has the advantage of not running in the dock's memory space; meaning that if the dockling comes down, the whole dock doesn't come down with it. It also stops Apple from having to maintain yet another API that has similar functionally provided by standard application dock menus.

With this said, however, having neat little compact docklings wasn't always too bad.

But, their functionally can be replaced by so many things, and they were always a private API anyway, so I can definitely see why Apple made the decision to finally stop supporting them.

Detrius · Aug 30, 2002, 10:03 AM

The vanity dockling still works in Jaguar. This may because this Jaguar installation is an upgrade rather than a clean install. I haven't tried it on my desktop, which was a clean install.

Diggory Laycock · Aug 31, 2002, 08:43 PM

Originally posted by Detrius:
The vanity dockling still works in Jaguar. This may because this Jaguar installation is an upgrade rather than a clean install. I haven't tried it on my desktop, which was a clean install.

I've got Vanity Dockling running on my clean install of Jaguar.

I did build it from the sources so that may be why it works.

mythrndr · Sep 4, 2002, 02:49 PM

Docklings are still supported in Jaguar, with no visible change from 10.1.5. At least this is the case with compiled Docklings that are autodetected by SystemUIServer. I have no personal experience with the private programmatic API that would allow you to dynamically load them in. It wasn't needed, so I didn't bother "discovering" it.

One area that has changed is in that of MenuExtras (the menu items in the upper right of the menu bar). This is a private API that some applications such as WeatherPop were using. If you however use the NSStatusBar API (which is public) then there is no problem.

-Jeff