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Issue 5.6

FEATURE

Third Party Plugins: Statusitems

Getting an icon in the top right of the Mac OS X menubar

Issue: 5.6 (September/October 2007)
Author: Christian Schmitz
Author Bio: Christian Schmitz is the creator of the Monkeybread Software REALbasic Plugins.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 16,958
Starting Page Number: 31
Article Number: 5611
Resource File(s):

Download Icon 5611.zip Updated: 2007-09-14 19:41:07

Related Web Link(s):

http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/realbasic/plugins.shtml
http://www.monkeybreadsoftware.de/pluginhelp/themes.shtml

Excerpt of article text...

Recently I had a request for a time tracking application to add a fast profile switching feature, like the one found in Skype. Skype -- and also iChat -- allow the use of a global menu item to switch the users status.

How to do that?

Technically, the only possible way to get something in this menu is to use the NSStatusItem class from Cocoa. And the most complete set of classes which covers that for REALbasic are the classes in the Monkeybread Software REALbasic plug-ins. Of course you can do everything yourself by writing your own classes and sending objective C messages using the objective C runtime methods. But before you do that, you may consider to just use the plugins as they save you a lot of time in creating and debugging code.

Install the plug-ins into REALbasic so you have the NSStatusItemMBS class at hand from the Cocoa plugin part. This article is based on version 7.4 of the MBS Plugins. Of course a newer version may be better because of some bugs being fixed.

Integration in Application

Once you decide to use a global menu for your application you have to think on how you implement it. Is this a part of your application or an extra background application? As being part of the application the menu only appears if the application is running. I use this way for my time tracking application where the menu switches the current profile. The profile can only be switched while the application is running, so an extra application is not needed. Other applications like iChat do it different. They are divided into two parts: in iChat's case, they are iChat and iChatAgent. Doing the menu in a separate application has several advantages. First you can keep the menu in the menubar even if your main application is not running. Second, you have two applications and if one crashes, the other can take over and relaunch the other. Third, you can provide an application launcher for your application. So if the user clicks on the menu and the main application is not running, you can launch it.

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