Developer Chad McQuinn has made several structural changes to his Mac OS X Utilities plug-in. It has now been divided into three separate plug-ins — each plug-ins functions use a prefix to avoid naming conflicts. The plug-ins don’t depend on each other.
The MMisc plug-in includes functions for manipulating the quit and preferences menu items in the application menu, as well as for installing and managing a standard “Window” menu. It also includes a function “IsOSXRunning,” which should be checked before using most functions in any of these plug-ins, McQuinn said.
The MFile plug-in offers utilities for working with icons, UNIX paths, and “kind strings.” The MDock plug-in offers utilities for manipulating dock icons. It can provide animations, as well as overlay or changing an application’s icon.
All three, developed with the REALbasic environment, are free and are Carbon only.
“The plug-ins have been weak-linked against CarbonFramework.lib, which means you can still build an app with them to run under Mac OS 8 or 9, but of course, you can’t use Mac OS X functionality,” Chad said. Documentation is included in the download, which is on his iDisk.