WinSwitch: future directions

First up, welcome to the WinSwitch forum! Today is release day for WinSwitch 1.0, and this is the first post I've made here...

Now, I am hoping that Apple will implement an equivalent of WinSwitch in a forthcoming update to Mac OS X, but even so I am thinking about ways to improve it in the meantime...

My number one idea for now is to add a "Show" submenu at the bottom which allows the user to choose one of four items:

1. Custom user icon 2. Generic icon 3. Full username 4. Short username

WinSwitch 1.0 currently always displays a generic icon in the menu bar (like option 2) above. Apple's Fast User Switching menu always shows the Full username (option 3).

I think it would be fairly easy to add options 1 and 4 to WinSwitch.

Any comments or further suggestions?

And remember, WinSwitch is opensource, so if you want to have a hack away at it yourself, you can grab the full source code from the product website. If you make any changes or improvements, let me know!

Quote: I have a US version of OSX 10.3.3 and after installing WinSwitch the Apple version did not disappear? I now have two fastuser switching menus. Yours and Apples?

Is this a bug or did I do something wrong? Please help, Thanks Tom

No it's not a bug. The two are entirely independent of each other, so you have to drag the Apple one off the menu (Command-drag).

To avoid this kind of confusion, the WinSwitch 1.1 installer takes the Apple menu out of the menu bar.

Quote: I'd like a little more how to use documentation?

how do you elimnate long log in names?

how do you choose which names appear on menu?

You can find this out by looking at the source code (link on the the WinSwitch product page).

Both of these bugs fixed in 1.1 (to be released tomorrow).

Quote: Great start to an needed app. I've installed 1.1 and so far everything works great except that each user except the one currently logged on is displayed twice in the list.

I'd be very interested to hear if you could investigate this a little bit further for me. Does the problem persist after logging out (I mean fully logging out, not just switching to another user)? Do you have to take any specific actions to get this problem to manifest, or is it like that from the start?

Quote: I know that OS X doesn't have separate fields for your first name and surname, but taking as a rule that the first name is the string of characters before the first space in the full username, could that not work? My first name is Simon, which is nice and short, but adding Bayaidah makes the menu extra far too wide. #3, the "Short username" option, is only any good for this if your short username is the same as your first name, and even then, the first letter is not capitalised.

If that's not possible, #6 could simply bring up a dialog box, prompting for whatever text you want to appear in the menu extra. That way you could have first names, nicknames etc.

The nicknames would probably have to be stored in /Library/Preferences/com.wincent.WinSwitch.plist rather than ~/Library/Preferences/com.wincent.WinSwitch.plist, so that all users on the system could have the correct nickname appear in their menu extra, if they decided to use that with the nickname option. If you can think up a good GUI, you could even have the option for each user to have different nicknames for the different users on the machine, and then you wouldn't need to use the global library folder.

Just my thoughts. At the moment, I'm using the generic icon, and I like it far more than the long username.

Ooh, two more suggestions. First, the renaming of the "Open Accounts..." option to simply "Accounts..."; that selecting such a menu option will open the Accounts preference pane is somewhat of a given. Second, the option to remove said menu option, the "Show" one too, even if just via changing boolean values in the user specific preference file, as I can't think of a good GUI to make such changes.

It's "Open Accounts..." because if you look in the Apple-supplied menu extras you'll see that they always say things like "Open Date & Time...", "Open Energy Saver..." etc. In fact, the Apple HIG says you should always use verbs in buttons and menu items (with few exceptions, like the "Preferences..." menu item). Of course, if you want to change this you do have access to the source code!

As for your other suggestions, thanks for contributing! As I hope you can tell from WinSwitch, my goal is to make something very "Mac", the sort of thing that people would just assume was made by Apple. Some of the suggestions you offer lead us away from that "Apple-ness" a little bit, but that's just my opinion! These forums are here to discuss and debate exactly this kind of thing... Keep the comments coming!

Quote: I do not know how to do this. How do I do this?

Easiest way doesn't even require access to the source. Edit the "Localizable.strings" file inside the WinSwitch.menu bundle so that the strings on the right hand side read the way you want them. eg. Change it from:

"Open Accounts" = "Open Accounts...";

to:

"Open Accounts" = "Accounts...";

Quote: Yeah, I got kind of carried away with the nicknames and such. All I really want is the option to use just my first name, rather than my full name. Is possible? Or too much of a headache?

Possible? Yes. Headache? No. It's quite easy to implement. But I basically want to write what Apple should have written, and only what they should have written, knowing that they'll probably go ahead and improve their menu when 10.4 comes out and there'll no longer be any need for WinSwitch...

Quote: Personnaly, I regret that the network users (NIS users in my case) are no longer visible as of version 1.2, could this be made optional?

At least all users who are currently logged in should appear, including network users. This is what Apple's fast user switching does now, it hides the network users except those who are logged in at this display.

I don't have a network here to do any testing on, so the changes in 1.2 were made based on feedback from a user who complained that his menu had hundreds of non-local users in it...

So I need more information to know exactly what the desired behaviour is and how to identify it.

Specifically, these network users who are "logged in at this display", can you tell me exactly what you mean? Do you mean they don't have accounts on that particular machine (ie. their home directories are on another machine) but that they can log in remotely and access their remote files as though they were local?

If this is the case, I imagine it should be easier enough to identify who they are by looking for "loginwindow" processes and finding out the corresponding UID number.

Can you confirm for me that these "remote" users have a loginwindow process (look it up using "ps auxww" in the Terminal) and that they have a UID number which is unique in the NetInfo database?

Many thanks, Wincent

Quote: My favorite view is "1. Custom user icon"...but is it possible to make it larger? It looks like you have left a "margin" arount the icon, I think you should make it go from top to bottom of the menu bar (I use the dragon fly icon and it is currently nearly invisible).

Thanks....

It's 16x16 pixels. I chose that number because it scales nicely from the common icon sizes (32x32, 48x48, 64x64, 128x128 etc). I will try making it bigger and see if it looks ok... (19x19 is about as big as we can go without hitting the edge of the menubar.)