FMenu

FMenu is a program for Mac OS X and Facebook that sits in the menu bar (near the clock) and provides 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 (including turning on/off and customizing display style). They are:

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Screenshot of the FMenu 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

FMenu 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, FMenu has absolutely no way of retrieving that user's profile.

Download

The latest version is 1.3. It is a Universal Binary and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or better.

• FMenu for users who already have Growl installed on their system (.zip file, 213k)

FMenu 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.

Older versions can be obtained below; however they are unsupported, are generally inferior, and only provided for archival purposes.

Installation

Simply download the appropriate file above, then double-click it. FMenu.app will appear in the same folder as the .zip file you just downloaded. Move FMenu.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 FMenu from the window that appears.

Note that currently, FMenu 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

• If you put your computer to sleep for an extended period of time, FMenu 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

1.3

released Jan 13, 2007 – current version download

• Wall can now be accessed either from your profile or from the wall posts page (with preference)
• Profile updated notifications now detect the gender of the person who updated his profile
• Update frequency pref is now observed correctly
• Growl preferences... button now correctly detects Growl installations outside the user's home directory
• FMenu now properly detects the lack of a network connection, eliminating repeated profile update notifications and other quirks

1.2

released Jan 1, 2007 – archived download

• Made dynamic menu items localizable
• Added pref to change update frequency (default is 7 seconds)
• Cosmetic/UI improvements & code cleanup
• Huge memory leak fixed thanks to an update from Mike Kinney to the MKAbeFook framework

1.1

released Dec 26, 2006 – archived download

• 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