10.3: Re-activate PTH menubar apps' menus
Feb 09, '04 10:19:00AM
Contributed by: Anonymous
A number of menu bar applications from PTH Consulting no longer display their menus in 10.3.x Panther. There is no official fix, as the company has joined with You Software and many beloved PTH apps are now unavailable for download. The unofficial instructions were also removed from the web site. Thanks to members of the X4U Mac OS X email list for digging this up!
The PTH Menu Bar applications do not work properly under Mac OS X 10.3. Specifically, the menus aren't being shown in the Menu Bar when the application is selected. There are two ways around this problem. The first option is to edit the Info.plist file in the application wrapper and remove two lines. This will cause the application to show up on the Dock, and will also cause their menus to display properly. To do this, follow these steps:
- Select the app in the Finder
- Control click on the app and select Show Package Contents
- Double click on the Contents folder
- Control click on the "Info.plist" file and use the "Open With" command to open using TextEdit
- Remove the following two lines:
<key>NSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>
- Save the file
You may also need to move the application from its current location to another directory and back again. This will cause OS X to re-read the Info.plist file. The second method is to just use the command key equivalents to access the desired menu items. To do this follow these steps:
- Click on the application icon in the Menu Bar to activate the application
- Type in an appropriate key combination:
- Command , : Show Preference
- Command q : Quit
- Shift-Command ? : Show Help
[robg adds: I did this with PTH Pasteboard just after Panther shipped, as it's probably the single most-used application on my machine (next to the Finder!). I'm looking forward to seeing what You Software brings to the table, but until they ship something, PTH Pasteboard will continue to be my multi-clipboard of choice.]
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