FMenu

FaceMenu a program for Mac OS X and Facebook. It sits in your menu bar near your clock and provides you with notifications about various events. In addition, it provides a menu to easily access common Facebook pages and keeps a count of your messages, pokes, events, friend requests, wall posts, and photo comments. Notifications are issued using Growl and can be customized to the user's liking. They are:

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Screenshot of the FaceMenu menu (click for high res version)

• A friend updated his profile
• A friend changed his status
• A friend wrote a new note
• Someone wrote on your wall
• You have new messages
• You have new pokes
• You have new friend requests
• You have new photo comments

FaceMenu checks for updates every 7 seconds, but checks for each kind of notification (friend details & requests, wall, photo comments, messages, pokes) separately. Consequently each particular type of notification is refreshed once every 35 seconds.

Please note: this application will work with most of your friends. However, if you are not getting notifications for some friends, it probably means that they have opted out of releasing their info to applications using the Facebook API. Tell your friends to go to http://www.facebook.com/privacy.php?view=everyone and make sure that the box labeled My information may be used according to the restricted Terms of Service is checked. Otherwise, FaceMenu has absolutely no way of retrieving that user's profile.

Download

The latest version is 1.2. It is a Universal Binary and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or better.

• FaceMenu for users who already have Growl installed on their system (.zip file, 213k)
• FaceMenu for everyone else (.zip file, 1.3M)

FaceMenu is released under the GNU General Public License. Source code can be found inside the application package by going to FaceMenu.app/Contents/Resources/Source.

Installation

Simply download the appropriate file above, then double-click it. FaceMenu.app will appear in the same folder as the .zip file you just downloaded. Move FaceMenu.app to your Applications and double-click it to open. You might also want to add it to your startup items by going to System Preferences→Accounts, selecting your account on the left, then clicking on the Login items tab. Click the + button and choose FaceMenu from the window that appears.

Note that currently, FaceMenu requires a login every time it is opened. This is a limitation imposed by Facebook's API and is completely beyond my control. If you're not happy with that, please contact them and ask them to change this.

Acknowledgments

This application completely relies on MKAbeFook framework written by Mike Kinney to communicate with the Facebook API. In addition, the first version of the app was written by Logan Rockmore of Logan Design.

Known issues

• Currently, FaceMenu will consume increasing amounts of memory as it runs. While I do not have a lot of experience with Objective-C, it appears that the problem is not in my code but instead in either the MKAbeFook framework or Apple's own XML methods. My suggestion, for the time being, is to restart FaceMenu at the end of the day before putting your computer to sleep to free up the memory that it uses.
• If you put your computer to sleep for an extended period of time, FaceMenu will obviously give a large number of notifications that happened during the time that your computer was turned off the first time it updates. Make sure that the number of "sticky" notifications is not very high, because otherwise you will spend a lot of time dismissing all of them.

Version history

1.2

• Made dynamic menu items localizable
• Added pref to change update frequency (default is 7 seconds)
• Cosmetic/UI improvements & code cleanup

1.1

• Split up updates to provide the ability to check for new info more frequently
• Added ability to logout and force manual updates
• Added tracking of friends' details (status, notes, and profile details)
• Added Growl notifications
• Universal Binary

1.0

• Initial release by Logan