Posted December 6th, 2004 @ 05:51pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Two problems with this:
Y'know, because this would be soooo terrible as a faceless application with a menu. Talk about unnecessarily limiting your market (to those who want to "hack").
And into the trash it goes. Total time spent considering it as an addition to my software toolset: 37 seconds.
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Posted 06 Dec 2004 at 6:18pm #
Funny, I'm still considering it. 🙂 I've run Unsanity's menu extra enabler before, and I'll run it again for this.
But you're right - it would be so much better if they just did what Glucose does with WeatherPop.
Posted 06 Dec 2004 at 6:25pm #
I don't think either of these things warrant trashing the software. I think maybe more time should be spent suggesting these things to the author and using the software than complaining and trashing it.
The simple fact is, if you use .Mac this menu extra is pretty neat. Neither of your two complaints change that, and it's definitely not "lame."
Posted 06 Dec 2004 at 6:29pm #
Anything that requires a hack is lame. Particularly when there are perfectly valid "other" ways of doing it.
Obviously the first doesn't necessitate trashing it, because if you can't find the download link ya got nothing to trash. It's a comment on their site.
The second, to me, does warrant its trashing.
Posted 06 Dec 2004 at 8:06pm #
Yeah, hacking SystemUIServer to allow third party menu extras is evil and really lame given the existence of the LSUIElement property and the NSStatusItem class.
Posted 06 Dec 2004 at 8:45pm #
I'd just do it as a dock menu on a "real" application. This gives me a couple things:
1) I always have room for "just one more thing" in my Dock, especially if it's useful
2) I have /Applications, ~/Documents, a bunch of random folders, my Home directory, ~/Desktop, and my boot disk in my Dock already. Yes, I do like the Dock ;-), so to me, I'm quite used to Dock menus as a way of getting things done.
3) If it's a 'real' app, it's real easy to kill