Support for moving the menu bar icon in Mac OS X

Suggestions/comments/criticisms are welcome here

zexpe

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Joined: Sun Sep 18, 2011 5:02 am

Post by zexpe » Sun Sep 18, 2011 5:09 am
Is it possible to support Cmd-Click moving of the menu bar icon for Viscosity? Doing a bit of research I see that it requires use of an undocumented Apple API, NSMenuExtra, which puts some developers off, though others suggest the worse that would happen if something went wrong would be a restart of the SystemUIServer. What's your opinion on this one?

I realise there's an option to move it to the far right, instead of the far left, but I personally prefer to keep my clock as far right as possible...

James

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Joined: Thu Sep 04, 2008 9:27 pm

Post by James » Wed Sep 28, 2011 5:18 am
Hi zexpe,

We did consider going with a NSMenuExtra menu (instead of a NSStatusItem), however the problem is Apple have been quite aggressive in the past at blocking developers from using NSMenuExtra. They'll often block whatever is the current workaround for accessing the API in updates to Mac OS X ("MenuCracker"), which means that after a system update Viscosity's menu may disappear (or Viscosity crash), which wouldn't go down too well among users.

That's not to say we've ruled the idea out - in fact it's still something we want to implement (I personally would prefer the icon to the left side of the battery indicator). However any implementation would have to use a NSStatusItem by default, and find some way to revert to a NSStatusItem if loading a NSMenuExtra fails.

Cheers,
James
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