[jobim]

I'd like to build menubar and context menu plugins for the Finder in MacOS 10.2 or later. I've seen plenty of them out there (Stuffit, APE, MenuPop, etc) so I know it must be possible to figure it out or reverse engineer Apple's *.plugin bundles.

According to the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines at Apple's dev site:

"Don't create your own menu bar status items. Use the Dock menu functions to open a menu from your application?s icon in the Dock."

So I doubt Apple is going to help me out. Anyone else have any information to help make my life much easier developing menu bar status items and Finder context menu plugins?

Thanks.

[Chuckit]

Apple has an example of creating a Contextual Menu Plugin in their sample code section.

As for creating a status item, the NSStatusItem API is available for anyone to see. If you want it to be a Menu Extra, though, you'll have to class-dump SystemUIServer, and then your users will still need Unsanity's Menu Extra Enabler.

[jobim]

Apple has an example of creating a Contextual Menu Plugin in their sample code section.

Ah, they Carbonized CMM. Thought Apple might have developed a Cocoa equivalent. Guess not.

As for creating a status item, the NSStatusItem API is available for anyone to see. If you want it to be a Menu Extra, though, you'll have to class-dump AppKit, and then your users will still need Unsanity's Menu Extra Enabler. [/B]

Looks like using NSStatusItem and having a deamon around to handle the actions will be what I need. Glad they have NSStatusItem in Java since most of my underlying code is Java, for cross platform reasons, but I'm targeting my UI as MacOS X sexy. I guess I'll find out how well the Java version works. Since what I need is MacOS 10.2 and beyond, I don't see a reason for Menu Extra Enabler, unless I'm missing something.

Found some useful NSStatusItem tips here:

NSStatusItem Tutorial at Cocoa Dev Central

Again, thanks for all the help.

[Chuckit]

Just wanted to point out that it's SystemUIServer, not AppKit, that you need to class-dump for the Menu Extra interface. Don't know why I said AppKit. Anyway, as long as I'm here...

Originally posted by jobim:
Since what I need is MacOS 10.2 and beyond, I don't see a reason for Menu Extra Enabler, unless I'm missing something.

Well, Menu Extra Enabler only has an affect on 10.2 and up. As of 10.2, Apple has put a check in SystemUIServer to make sure that only Apple-created plugins would work. Menu Extra Enabler patches the verification function to always return YES. But since you're using an NSStatusItem, the restriction on Menu Extras won't affect you.

[ambush]

Originally posted by jobim:
Ah, they Carbonized CMM. Thought Apple might have developed a Cocoa equivalent. Guess not.



Looks like using NSStatusItem and having a deamon around to handle the actions will be what I need. Glad they have NSStatusItem in Java since most of my underlying code is Java, for cross platform reasons, but I'm targeting my UI as MacOS X sexy. I guess I'll find out how well the Java version works. Since what I need is MacOS 10.2 and beyond, I don't see a reason for Menu Extra Enabler, unless I'm missing something.

Found some useful NSStatusItem tips here:

NSStatusItem Tutorial at Cocoa Dev Central

Again, thanks for all the help.

An app with LSUIElement set to "1" should do the trick. good luck.

[Mskr]

IMO, I would stick to the NSStatusItem API, since the Menu Extra hidden API is a moving target. Menu Extra Enabler is not guarenteed to work when 10.3 is released, and I don't know if you want to have to wait for them to fix MEE for your app to work. There are some niceties that don't work when you use the NSStatusItem API, like command-moving the status item, but I think that having an app that will work in future OS versions without resorting to someone else's hackery is more valuable. Also, by now most people understand that 3rd party status bar items don't behave like Menu Extras, anyway, so this will reduce the confusion.

[rant]I do, however, wish that Apple would unify the functionality of these two separate APIs. Both of our major 'productivity' apps use status bar items, because they aren't 'normal' apps, and it really sucks that they don't behave like Apple's menu extras. It really reflects badly on the 3rd party developers when their stuff doesn't work like Apple's own (since it looks like we're doing something wrong), and that's just not Developer FriendlyTM! [/rant]

Also, they need to work out the SystemUIServer and Dock synchronization bugs (well, and Dockling initialization bug), but that's a whole different thread...

[Edit: How come the unicode tm (option-2) doesn't work?]