Feature Idea: Make HardwareGrowler Open Prefs If "Started While Already Running"

[Markus Hanauska]

I guess a lot of people prefer to manually add LSUIElement=true to their Info.plist, so the app won't show up in the dock. So far so well, but how can you change the one and only preference this app is offering if you do so? Right, you cannot.

Idea: When I double click the app for the first time (or start it during login), it just starts. If I double click it again, it shows the prefs dialog (which is possible for a LSUIElement application). A lot of applications that make use of LSUIElement behave that way.

Another idea would be to add a "Quit" button to the prefs window, so you can also quit the application that way, since there is no other way to quit a LSUIElement app otherwise (unless you want to kill it in Activity Viewer or via command line).

That way you can always edit the prefs, you can always Quit the application and thus the question would be, why not making it LSUIElement=true by default? Unless it is planned to ever have some active user interaction I see no point in showing this application in the Dock at all.

What do you think about that idea? Are there any people out there who want to have HardwareGrowler in the Dock for any reason I fail to see?

BTW implementing this feature is dead simple. A single NSApplication delegate method must be implemented in the object set as delegate and the only action this method must perform is opening the dialog. The system calls this method whenever the user clicks on the Dock icon of an application, but it also calls this method when an application is currently running and the user double clicks the application again.

Regards,
Markus

[Peter Hosey]

On Nov 11, 2009, at 05:02:17, Markus Hanauska wrote:
> Idea: When I double click the app for the first time (or start it
> during login), it just starts. If I double click it again, it shows

> the prefs dialog …

>
> Another idea would be to add a "Quit" button to the prefs window, so
> you can also quit the application that way, since there is no other
> way to quit a LSUIElement app otherwise (unless you want to kill it
> in Activity Viewer or via command line).
>
> That way you can always edit the prefs, you can always Quit the
> application and thus the question would be, why not making it
> LSUIElement=true by default?

I like the way you think.

http://code.google.com/p/growl/issues/detail?id=55
http://code.google.com/p/growl/issues/detail?id=56
http://code.google.com/p/growl/issues/detail?id=57
http://code.google.com/p/growl/issues/detail?id=58

[Chris Forsythe]

I've been thinking about this and thought of another way to go about
it. We're looking at making an extras tab, we could possibly leverage
that to make hwgrowler run in the background rather than this solution.

I think either way we need to solve this though.

Chris

[Peter Hosey]

On Nov 11, 2009, at 05:41:06, Chris Forsythe wrote:
> We're looking at making an extras tab, we could possibly leverage

> that to make hwgrowler run in the background…

How are these two things related?

[Evan Schoenberg, M.D.]

I believe:

[ ] Notify when connected hardware changes

which would manage launching and quitting HWGrowler is what Chris is
proposing. The app would no longer exist as a user-visible entity
regardless of implementation details.

-Evan

[Chris Forsythe]

Aye. It's too early for me to summarize things, good thing we have a
doctor on staff.

Alternatively, there could be a checkbox like this:

[ ] Run HardwareGrowler in the background

However, I like what Evan said more.

Chris