SparkleShare should be dockless on Mac OS

[jcjaskula]

Hello,

I would say that Sparkleshare doesn't need to have an icon in the dock but just a little icon in the menu bar. After googling a little bit, it appears that setting NSUIElement to 1 in Info.plist allows to have this behavior.

From http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/General/Reference/InfoPlistKeyReference/Articles/LaunchServicesKeys.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001431-108256 :

"LSUIElement (String - Mac OS X) specifies whether the application runs as an agent application. If this key is set to “1”, Launch Services runs the application as an agent application. Agent applications do not appear in the Dock or in the Force Quit window. Although they typically run as background applications, they can come to the foreground to present a user interface if desired. A click on a window belonging to an agent application brings that application forward to handle events.

The Dock and loginwindow are two applications that run as agent applications."

JC

[hbons]

The dock icon is there for various reasons stated here: https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/issues/closed#issue/30 Having two processes might be good, but I've no clue how to do it. If someone wants to step up and do it I accepts a patch.

[mattvague]

Hmm +1. Might try to think up a way to do this, it's bugging me as well. Awesome app otherwise!

[olivierguerriat]

I would go farther : I would love to have a SparkleShare client without any UI element (not even a menubar item).

Once set up, I don't need any UI and they're taking a lot of screen real estate on my laptop. There are numerous apps that are able[1] to work this way : Alfred, Witch, Screens connect, Growl, Teleport, Keyboard Maestro… While most of them use a preferences pane, some simply display configuration window when opening them a second time.

Is there already a daemon I could launch with Terminal that would not add any dock or menubar icons ?

[1] they display menubar item by default but offer the option of hiding them.

[hbons]

@olivierguerriat there are already GUI-less tools that do this (like dvcs-autosync), so I don't see the value in adding this.

[olivierguerriat]

I answered by mail but it doesn't seem to have worked.

I wasn't aware of dvcs-autosync and it could answer my latest question if it worked on Mac OS X, but my main "request" was not for a GUI-less tool.

What I would love is :

• a GUI to configure my synchronized folders, to check if everything is working fine, to set some parameters.
• the ability among those parameters to completely hide the GUI when I'm not configuring it

My point is that for my usage, tools like SparkleShare should be invisible once configured. And I'm pretty sure I'm not alone, 2000+ people are asking the exact same option to Dropbox : https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/32/disable-tray-menu-bar-icon

Nevertheless, I understand you point but hope you'll consider mine.

(in the meantime, if you know an alternative to dvcs-autosync that works on Mac OS X, please let me know)

[olivierguerriat]

If someone is interested in dvcs-autosync for Mac, I made a very basic & rough Mac port. Feel free to fork and enhance it.

[hbons]

@olivierguerriat you could write a very simple client using Mono and SparkleLib in just a few lines.

[hbons]

cleaning up issue tracker. unlikely that this wil be implemented...