A few xbar requests focused at enterprise/business users

[dstranathan]

Not sure if these have been addressed elsewhere, I apologize if they have!

-LaunchAgent: No reason I can't start (and force a keep-alive) via a LaunchAgent, correct?

-Hide "xbar" sub-menu: Any way to remove the xbar settings at the bottom (or expose with a key combo perhaps).

-Move app to /Applications/Utilities: I'd prefer to not have the xbar.app bundle in Applications. Any reason I cant move it?

-Hide initial pop-up at first launch: Any way to prevent the dialog/demo from popping up at startup?

-Auto-update app without user intervention? I'd like to keep xbar up to date in the background without end-user intervention.

[leaanthony]

-LaunchAgent: No reason I can't start (and force a keep-alive) via a LaunchAgent, correct?

Probably.

-Hide "xbar" sub-menu: Any way to remove the xbar settings at the bottom (or expose with a key combo perhaps).

Not currently, but it would be possible.

-Move app to /Applications/Utilities: I'd prefer to not have the xbar.app bundle in Applications. Any reason I cant move it?

I don't think so?

-Hide initial pop-up at first launch: Any way to prevent the dialog/demo from popping up at startup?

The plan is to move this to the menu.

-Auto-update app without user intervention? I'd like to keep xbar up to date in the background without end-user intervention.

This may be possible and combined with the previous request.

[leaanthony]

I spent some time looking at hiding the submenu. So, hiding is easy, but showing it again is really quite difficult. Menus do not respond unless they are visible. There appears to be no simple hook to trigger it to show again. If you have any suggestions, I'd be keen to hear them.

[matryer]

@dstranathan I wanted to let you know that I added an Update automatically option to the xbar menu. It will automatically keep xbar up to date for you in the background. Currently it checks on startup, but future releases will also check every n hours in case there are bursts of releases in a short period of time - which can happen.

[dstranathan]

Thank you @matryer - Really excited to finish our prototype to demonstrate for our IT management team for use in production.

Will the auto-update engine expect the xbar.app bundle to be in /Applications?

Will it use Sparkle or similar framework?

Can IT set the xbar app to update automatically via a .plist file?

[shepazon]

@leaanthony -

I spent some time looking at hiding the submenu. So, hiding is easy, but showing it again is really quite difficult. Menus do not respond unless they are visible. There appears to be no simple hook to trigger it to show again. If you have any suggestions, I'd be keen to hear them.

There's a hook that you can capture when the menu is first opened that would let you do this. It's the NSMenuDelegate method menuNeedsUpdate, documented here. That's specifically designed for cases where you need to change the contents of the menu (including adding stuff) right before displaying and tracking it.

[leaanthony]

Thanks for that. We've got updating the menu covered, it's more how do you set the preference to do so.