MenuApp 1.0 review

MenuApp is a template of sorts demonstrating the following features: - A Dock menu with a dynamic submenu.

License: Freeware OS: Mac OS X File size: 0K Developer: Jonathan Nathan Price: $0.00 Updated: 24 Jan 2006

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MenuApp is a template of sorts demonstrating the following features:
- A Dock menu with a dynamic submenu.
- A Status Menu (similar to a menu extra) with a dynamic submenu.
- A background-only toggle to make the app modify itself to be either a standard application with a Dock menu, application menu, and listed in the basic applications list (i.e., the list shown when you do a force quit) or a background-only app with only the status menu visible.
- An AppleScript to Objective-C bridge for calling Objective-C methods from AppleScript.
- An Objective-C to AppleScript bridge for calling AppleScript handlers from Objective-C.
- Registering, reading, and writing defaults using "user defaults".

When building and running, you may receive an "NSReceiverEvaluationScriptError: 3 (1)" error. This seems somewhat arbitrary and, if it appears, the application won't run properly. This error is related to waking elements from the NIB and can sometimes be remedied by modifying and saving the MainMenu NIB and then rebuilding the app. If you have launched the app on its own and not been able to access it due to the error yet the status menu (an "M" on the right side of your menu bar) is visible, use the included "MenuApp Quitter" applet to quit MenuApp.

To enable the background-only feature in your project, modify the internal Info.plist to create the LSUIElement property which toggles the background only bit of an app (you can add this by going to "Build>Edit Active Target For.." from PB, go to Expert View under Info.plist Entries, and add a new sibling with a property list of LSUIElement, a class of string, and a value of 1 (for background only) or 0 (for standard)). This has already been enabled in the MenuApp project.