Common Menu Item for Plugin Information etc.

[Fabian Jäger]

Dear all,
as I am receiving emails asking whether a plugin is installed correctly, which version is installed and how to uninstall a plugin, I was wondering what might be good solution to this.
One idea that came to my mind is whether we can come to an agreement of a common menu item in Mail's menu with a title "Plugins". Then each of our plugins could add a corresponding menu item under this common item with information about the particular plugin. The structure could look like this:

Mail
|----> Plugins
|----> ForgetMeNot
|----> Version 1.2.2 (342)
|----> Preferences...
|----> Uninstall...
|----> MailHub
|----> Version 2.0.3 (123)
|----> Preferences...
|----> Uninstall...
|----> SendLater
|----> Version 1.0 (621)
|----> Uninstall...

What do you think about this approach? The only requirement would be that we define the identifier of the "Plugins" menu item, so that each plugin can find it and add itself to the submenu.

Best regards,
Fabian

[Scott Little]

Fabian,

This would not be practical. Who would create the menu if the first place. If everyone is creating it the it becomes a mess.

As mentioned before there is already a potential solution in my Mail Plugin Manager. It shows version info, what is installed and what is disabled and ugims can be updated, disabled, enabled and removed from it.

Scott

Scott Little
http://littleknownsoftware.com

[Fabian Jäger]

Hi Scott,
if we agreed on the identifier, we can easily check whether the menu is already there or not. I don't see an implementation issue here. But I can understand your other argument with Mail Plugin Manager in place. Maybe I should look into it again and decide afterwards with which of the two solutions I will move forward with my plugins.

Best regards,
Fabian

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[Adam Nohejl]

Dear Fabian,

Technically, we could pull this off quite easily. If we agree on an identifier and a structure of the menu, the first plug-in that would see the menu missing could create it (we would do it on the main thread, so no need to worry about race conditions).

But I am not a big fan of having stuff like version numbers in menus. What about adding just a single submenu: "Plug-ins" (or "Plug-in Preferences") and having a single item (that would open the correspodning preference pane) for each plug-in? Separate preference panes are already an established way to display Mail plug-in interface. This is also where I show my version number and the removal option.

For me the question is whether it is worth it to essentially reduplicate the interface offered by the Mail preferences window. (It would be great though, if someone could make a better toolbar for it that would show all items in multiple rows so that we would not have to explain to users that they have to use the disclosure arrow:).)

--
Adam Nohejl, Lokiware
http://lokiware.info
twitter: @lokiware

[Scott Little]

Yeah I realized just after sending that it wouldn't be a big deal for a simple menu, but I still don't care for the idea.

I think that if you want to add something add a menu for your plugin (like Scott does for MailTags and Mail ActOn). If a customer has a bunch of plugins installed, I doubt they are going to complain about a bunch of extra menu items in the Mail menu. Then we don't have to worry about what is that each developer wants to put in the menu. This kind of info should be in the prefs (as Adam said).

I also would love a better implementation of the prefs pane, but that would definitely be more complicated to implement well than just looking to see if a menu was available. We'd need a common class (to ensure the same appearance, but individually prefixed so as to avoid collisions) that would do a similar thing as Adam mentioned (run on main thread to avoid race condition) and installed a better preference pane handler. It's not a bad idea. I might work on that.

Scott

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Scott Little

scott.j...@gmail.com

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[Fabian Jäger]

Hi Scott,
could you maybe add an example plugin Xcode project to your MailPluginManager repository? Currently it is kind of fuzzy what needs to be done to bundle MPM with a particular Mail plugin. Such an example project would help us developers to understand the concepts behind MPM.
As Apple is now updating Mail through the Mac AppStore, a solution like MPM becomes more and more interesting as it would allow to update disabled plugins and bring them back to life...

Best regards,
Fabian

Am 01.11.2013 um 11:27 schrieb Scott Little <scott.j...@gmail.com>:

[Scott Little]

Fabian,

Sorry for a late response, I've been very busy and traveling lately. This would be a good idea and in any case some documentation needs to be updated, but unfortunately I don't have any time to do this right now.

Scott

—
"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
Steve P Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech
—  

Scott Little

scott.j...@gmail.com

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[Fabian Jäger]

Hi Scott,

do you have any intended timeline on when you could find some time to prepare the documentation and/or an example plugin that uses MPM? I would really like to look deeper into this possibility...

Moreover, have you thought about the option to extend MPM to something similar to Apple's AppStore? Wouldn't it be nice to provide our user's some means to easily find other useful Mail plugins including a short description, screenshots and a download link? I think MPM can easily be extended to provide this functionality by not only showing installed plugins, but also other available plugins...

Best regards,

Fabian

[Scott Little]

Fabian,

I can't say for sure for a timeline, since I have the priorities for getting my plugins to a level that they need to be at. I was thinking that January is probably the earliest I could do this.

Actually I had considered making MPM into a little plugin store kind of thing and need to consider that a bit more.

Scott

—
"I've been trying to justify you
In the end, I will just defy you
To those who understand
I extend my hand
To the doubtful I demand
Take me as I am"
John Petrucci of Dream Theater "As I Am"
—  

Scott Little

scott.j...@gmail.com

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[Fabian Jäger]

Dear Scott, all,

we should really think about a joint work an extending MPM to such a plugin store kind of thing ... I would expect that such an application tremendously increases our sales numbers!

Best regards,

Fabian