Useful OS X Mini-Apps
It’s that time again - here are some apps I’ve written that occasionally come in handy. Gotta do something to pass the time, right?
This app lets you manage your MenuExtras - those little things at the top right of the screen. MenuMover actively adds and removes the extras based on your selection. You can drag the cells around the table, and the extras will be dynamically reordered! MenuMover makes use of some seriously undocumented system calls, so I can’t guarantee its persistance in later versions of OS X. BTW, if anyone can make a better icon, please do so. The current one hurts my eyes. Moving on…
A very useful tool for uncovering how apps communicate “behind-the-scenes” (especially iTunes and Dock). Leave it unattended, and it’s neat to see how many of these notifications OS X makes. And finally…
DockFX lets you easily change all your dock preferences, including some that System Preferences doesn’t. This was my first undocumented-goodness app, which used the CoreDock.h header file that’s been floating around for a while. It adds the “suck effect” to the list.
Some of these apps may have the occasional bug, don’t stress me about - this is freeware, and I’m still learning Cocoa. It really does make for beautiful code.
-Joe
January 31st, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Can you clarify whether MenuMover will work on a desktop Mac? I have so wanted to rearrange the top menu items on the Mac, and cannot find a utility to do it. I thought MenuMover might, but when I ran it the items in its list (for the most part) did not correspond to the icons in my menu bar - it had many items that I don’t, and some of the items I do have didn’t appear. I was not aware that the iPhone ran OS X, so that’s why I thought maybe this app was for the desktop Mac, but now I’m wondering. I was afraid to try doing anything with it given the difference in what it showed and what was actually in my top menu bar.
If this is an iPhone-only app, but anyone knows of a similar app for a desktop Mac, please leave a reply comment!
January 31st, 2008 at 5:29 pm
P.S. I know someone will say that you can click and drag menu items on a desktop Mac, but that ONLY works if the item does not produce a drop-down menu when you click on it. If it does produce a menu, then it seems the ability to click and drag goes away. BTW I am using OS X 10.5 (Leopard).
January 31st, 2008 at 5:42 pm
Yeah, cmd-ctrl-shift while dragging a menu will change its position (in Tiger at least). MenuMover is mostly useful for adding and removing them. This program is written for OS X, not iPhone, i just stuck it on this blog because my iPhone dev record is slowing down until the sdk release…
Note that the app only manipulates APPLE’s MenuExtras. 3rd party apps use a different type, which is documented in Cocoa (NSMenuExtra, or Item, something of that sort). So yeah, sorry I can’t help you there.
Also, the list contains ALL available menu extras. When launched, it removes all your extras so you can “start from scratch.” Then you add/rearrange them as you see fit, by clicking the checkbox next to the ones you want.