Talk:FMenu

FMenu version 3.1 was released on January 17, 2010 and includes stability improvements, UI changes to keep up with site updates, and full Snow Leopard compatibility. Note that there are now separate downloads for users of 10.4 and everyone else.

It is now 2023 and Facebook's API has changed significantly such that this app no longer works. The way that people use Facebook has changed dramatically as well. Growl no longer exists. Perhaps one day this app will come back — or not.

Bug reports & suggestions

If you have a bug to report or a suggestion that you want to make, first read what's already on this page as well as the FAQ to see if your question has already been answered, and if not, click the + at the top of the page (next to the edit tab) and tell me about it! I will get back to you here and appreciate your feedback.

Problem with ZIP archive?

I can't open the archive—StuffIt Expander 10 stalls approximately 95% through and doesn't start again, and StuffIt Expander 11 returns an error. Is there a place for me to download the app that's not compressed? 129.137.158.156 16:06, 29 January 2007 (EST)

Never mind, it seems I got a bad download from the link on the wiki. It worked the next time I tried it. 129.137.158.156 16:18, 29 January 2007 (EST)

Hm, that's weird, but I strongly discourage anyone from using Stuffit at all. Mac OS X's built-in BOMArchiveHelper.app does the job much better. Happy to hear that you were able to resolve the problem, however.lensovet 21:04, 29 January 2007 (EST)

Friends opting out of Terms of Service and Update frequency

I have three questions. First, exactly what effect does it have when a friend unchecks the Terms of Service box? Will FMenu not even be able to tell me when they poke or message me? Second, is there any way I can tell which friends have opted out of this? My third question is how frequent is "too frequent" for the update frequency? How frequently can I have it update without hitting the request limit? Thanks!

Here we go!

1. If the friend unchecks this box, they are completely invisible to the program. That means that anything about them is inaccessible, like their profile and their status. However, when they poke you, this is still accessible, because it is your information that's retrieved to find out the number of current pokes. So anything they do to you is available, because your info is retrieved, but anything they do to their profiles is not.
2. Yes, there is. click on the arrow at the right of the text field in the Quicklaunch panel. That lists all the friends that are available to you through the app (in a random order, unfortunately), which are alphabetized by first name as of version 1.5.
3. This is essentially a guess-and-check process. As of version 1.4, it appears that 7 seconds is in fact the most frequent update interval. I personally had it running with 6 seconds, but that would randomly give me incorrect notifications.

Hope that clears things up a bit! lensovet 14:40, 3 February 2007 (EST)

FMenu and Growl notifications

Great app, but a couple of suggestions.

1. It would be nice if you could click on the Growl notifications and be taken to the relevant page, e.g. if my friend updates a status and I click, it goes to her page or if someone posts on the wall, it takes me there.

2. The menu icon should also indicate whether people have posted or not. Perhaps by colour or counter?

1. Thanks! The first one is definitely something I will be looking into, hopefully soon.
2. As for the second one, I'm not exactly sure what you mean. What do you mean by "whether people have posted"? Posted what? Wall posts? Please clarify...thanks again! lensovet 14:47, 11 February 2007 (EST)

Basically, I think the Fmenu icon should have status indications. So if someone posts on your wall, it would be nice to have a number or something appear by or on the icon to let you know.

I see, so you want the updates to happen not only through Growl, but also through some change in the icon, correct? This can be set in the preferences for the unread messages, unseen pokes, upcoming events, friend requests; i figured the wall post counter would not be of much use since most people probably have hundreds of posts, but I can definitely add it if you think it will be useful. lensovet 22:26, 14 February 2007 (EST)

Future Features

Not sure if this is feasible, but it would be fantastic if you could do things through the program, e.g. poke specified people. Or if that wasn't possible, it should be fairly easy to link to the relevant page - the /poke.php? bit makes that easy, right? Just a thought. --82.43.144.131 18:48, 12 February 2007 (EST)

This is definitely doable. I'm thinking of using keyboard modifiers for each action – for example, pressing option-enter instead of enter to send a message, ctrl-enter to poke, etc. What do you think? lensovet 20:47, 12 February 2007 (EST)

This is similar to the question above I think, but would it be possible to make the keyboard shortcuts usable without having to click on the menu icon ie. being able to open the quicklaunch panel (which i think is great) --70.158.150.128 15:24, 13 February 2007 (EST)

I really want this as well, so I will try to get it into the next release. It is definitely doable. lensovet 23:08, 12 February 2007 (EST)

You know what would also be super great, the ability to have the cursor automatically appear inside the QuickLaunch Panel when it is launched, and when you complete a search that the panel would disappear. Then my life would be complete. --Loudestnoise 16:51, 15 February 2007 (EST)

Also, possibly a Quicksilver plugin? that would be awesome. --82.43.144.131 04:45, 13 February 2007 (EST)

How about auto updates? I'm pretty sure theres a cocoa plugin which helps with that (Adium, cyberduck and others use it) --212.85.20.100 04:14, 14 February 2007 (EST)

Yes, it's called Sparkle, but the setup for it is a bit intensive. It will happen eventually though. lensovet 11:55, 14 February 2007 (EST)

Duplicate notifications

I keep getting the same notifications over and over. I have moved my interval up to 30 seconds thinking it could have been cause by too frequent of an interval but I am continuing to see duplicate messages. It's a series of 5 or 6 messages, same messages each time.

I have the exact same problem and it is the same two updates from the same exact person. --70.158.150.128 15:24, 13 February 2007 (EST)

If the update you're getting is "XXX has updated his profile", that means that they are actually updating their profile that frequently. If it's something else, let me know. Thanks. lensovet 00:48, 13 February 2007 (EST)

The one that keeps repeating for me is "XXXX wrote a new note" and "XXXX has updated her profile" It is always the same person and I've looked at their profile and it doesn't look like it's changing to me. --70.158.150.128 15:23, 13 February 2007 (EST)

I can verify the above problem. I have one friend that has consistently showed up as "XXXX has updated her profile" and "XXXX wrote a new note." They show side by side, often with any other events from other friends. Its been showing up nonstop since I downloaded it two days ago. She only has one note from last year, so she hasn't written a new note every 5 minutes over the last two days. --146.151.11.242 03:24, 14 February 2007 (EST)

Wow, I just started getting this myself. Will def look into it. lensovet 11:54, 14 February 2007 (EST)

Haha, now I get New note wrote a new note or profile updated his profile. --65.82.99.3 12:16, 14 February 2007 (EST)

Just curious, to all who have reported this problem, what happens if you restart the app (or choose Logout from the menu and log back in)? Thanks... lensovet 21:38, 14 February 2007 (EST)

Do try that as an interim solution, but I think that I've found the problem. Apparently the information sent by Facebook's API would sometimes contain profiles with a blank "name" field, and I think this is what was setting off the erroneous notifications. I'll be testing a possible fix to see if the problem goes away. I should have a new release out this weekend. Stay tuned and thanks for the reports! lensovet 22:28, 14 February 2007 (EST)

Any news on when we can see that update? I'd be glad to test it to see if it resolves the duplicate notification issue Loudestnoise 11:56, 24 February 2007 (EST)

I hope to get it out this weekend...however I have a question for you, are you still getting those duplicate updates? After putting in the fix I mentioned above, I still got a few bogus notifications...but since then they've gone away, and I never had them in the first place, so their cause is hard for me to track/figure out. Are you still getting repeated notifications? Thanks! lensovet 14:02, 24 February 2007 (EST)

I have the newest version and I am experiencing the same problems I reported before (with new note/updated profile notifications appearing tandem, and alongside almost all other legitimate notifications. It is from the same person all the time, and they have not made any new notes. --146.151.11.242 16:54, 24 February 2007 (EST)

Please try the newest version, which just came out, and let me know if this is still happening. Thanks! lensovet 03:52, 26 February 2007 (EST)

I have just updated to the new version and have yet to receive any duplicate or incorrect notifications. Will keep watching and hoping there are none to come. Loudestnoise 15:11, 26 February 2007 (EST)

Still happens. I even went ahead and used appzapper to remove all existing pieces of FMenu and install v2.0. Same exact person same exact notices as before. Loudestnoise 15:24, 26 February 2007 (EST)

Agreed. I've updated and within 5 minutes have gotten the same person, same problem. --Shaun 02:23, 1 March 2007 (EST)

Check to see if that person has two separate facebook accounts. That happened to be the problem with the other user. lensovet 03:32, 1 March 2007 (EST)

Spinning Beachball

During normal use of FMenu sometimes the loading of the menu can take a minute plus during which when you mouse over the menubar and you see the spinning beachball of death. --Loudestnoise 12:14, 14 February 2007 (EST)

I will look into this, but i'm changing the heading since the app never actually crashes. lensovet 13:49, 14 February 2007 (EST)

Ha, this is true, my apologies --Loudestnoise 15:50, 15 February 2007 (EST)

Solution to your authentication problem and one feature request

Use Apple Keychain Why don't you use Apple's Keychain for the Username and Password of Facebook. When you start up the FMenu, you can get then the user/pass from the keychain and auto login. The user had to authorize the addition of the data to the keychain so you are perfectly valid in using that. This situation is what the keychain was designed for, just go ahead and use it.

That is precisely what I plan on doing, I just need to figure out how to code it. lensovet 17:15, 14 February 2007 (EST)

Sparkle for updates: The feature request I have is that you use the Sparkle framework for updates. That will allow us to not have to worry about updating and you'll get an auto-update engine for free.

Thanks, Aslam

Right, Sparkle requires an RSS feed with release info though, which is why it will take a bit to set up. I do plan on implementing it though. lensovet 17:15, 14 February 2007 (EST)

-=- Follow up:

I'm so glad to hear you're going to be using Keychain. It's great to see developers use the awesome tools that Apple gives us. I'm sure you've already found this recently updated document but just in case, I found info on programming with the Keychain here: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Security/Reference/keychainservices/keychainServRef.pdf

Secondly, you probably know about this also but I found the easiest way to setup an RSS feed was to use iWeb (part of iLife) and create a Blog page. iWeb automatically creates an RSS feed for you and then you can use that to regularly update the feed. If that doesn't provide enough customization, then tools like PodcastMaker from potionfactory.com or FeedForAll (http://www.feedforall.com/feedforall-mac.htm) or one of the other RSS Feed builder tools that are available for OSX might be helpful.

FMenu Going Nuts

A couple of times, I have had FMenu go nuts and start giving me notifications about all my friends, the same three or four notifications (new note, updated status, etc.), even though they had done none of the above. One time, it happened right when I plugged my MacBook into an external monitor. This went on ad infinitum, repeating notifications. The notifications stickied, and even though I turned both FMenu and Growl off, they kept coming. It bogged my system down so much (and kept notifying) that I had to do a hard shut-down of the MacBook. I've had FMenu disabled since. --Carl Peterson

I'm sorry to hear that you had such bad problems. I don't know why they were sticking; none of the notifications are set to sticky by default. I will be releasing a new version soon that will hopefully eliminate these repeated notifications once and for all, and hope that you will give it a try and let me know how it works for you. Thanks! lensovet 02:50, 21 February 2007 (EST)

I can hardly wait for the update. I've considered not using FMenu until the duplicates are fixed, but it's just so darn handy. Loudestnoise 12:39, 21 February 2007 (EST)

Updating status

It would be cool if you could update your own status using this program.

This would indeed be very cool, but unfortunately implementing such functionality is at this time against the Facebook API's Terms of Service. You should e-mail them at developers-help@facebook.com to let them know that you want such a feature so that they are aware of the interest. lensovet 16:57, 21 February 2007 (EST)

Integration with Firefox?

Great work with this app. I've been using the Facebook Toolbar for Firefox but I think I like this better. My question is if there's any way to pick the browser you'd like to use with FMenu. My main browser is Firefox and I would love for links to open in that instead of Safari. I didn't see anything in the FMenu/Growl preferences so I'm guessing there's no way to change it from Safari currently. Keep up the good work.

FMenu just uses the default browser set by the system; this preference can be changed from Safari. Open Safari, then open its Preferences. In the General tab, the first item there should be "Default Web Browser:" – simply choose Firefox from that list. Thanks! lensovet 12:35, 22 February 2007 (EST)

Awesome. You would think something like that would be in the system preferences. Thanks!

It used to be, up until 10.2, when Safari was introduced. After that they got rid of the pref pane. And people think Microsoft is bad ;) lensovet 22:27, 22 February 2007 (EST)

Random Quitting?

So during normal usage of my computer I will look up to the menu bar only to see that FMenu is missing. I never quit it, but it just disappears from my menu bar. Loudestnoise 20:12, 27 February 2007 (EST)

Does quicklaunch remain visible or no? If not, then that means that FMenu is crashing. Otherwise, it could be that just the icon is disappearing. Which is it? thanks... lensovet 23:03, 27 February 2007 (EST)

I'm not sure what you mean by quicklaunch remaining visible. The icon just disappears and according to activity monitor nothing named FMenu is running. Loudestnoise 01:09, 2 March 2007 (EST)

So yeah, it's crashing. Is it still happening on a regular basis, or did it just happen once? lensovet 01:12, 2 March 2007 (EST)

This happens to me as well. --82.43.144.131 13:15, 3 March 2007 (EST)

Photo comments fiction

Occasionally, say every hour or two, a growl thingy pops up saying "You have new photo comments", when I don't. I appreciate it trying to make me feel wanted, but there is an inevitable let-down when I find out it's been lying to me. Why?? I advise you to teach your program the value of honesty :p --82.43.144.131 13:19, 3 March 2007 (EST)