Chris Ivarson

We’ve been teased for the past couple weeks about it but last night saw the anticipated release of Fluid 0.9.4 into the wild. Now I don’t know about you but I was really looking forward to this release for one single reason: menu extra hiding.

If you don’t know what I mean by that, here’s a simple explanation: Fluid now gives you the option to completely hide your SSB, save for a menubar icon that you click and the app pops up underneath. There are several apps I can name just off the top of my head that benefit from this feature (mostly iPhone webapps):

• Hahlo
• Gmail (iPhone version)
• Digg (iPhone version)
• etc.

Reason being what’s great about making these menubar apps is that menubar apps should be compact and show pertinous information to you throughout the day, which is exactly what’s going on. Right now I use it for Gmail and Hahlo, but I’m also considering using it for other iPhone webapps because it’s so f-ing cool.

All was looking good until I created my first app with 0.9.4, Hahlo, only to learn the menubar icon was looking kinda hurt (I think it was using an iPhone webapp icon which looks great on the iPhone/iPod Touch but certainly not in our menubar). I started looking into changing this icon.

First thing I did was scour the app’s Resources directory looking for clues. I found out the menubar icon is called icon.tiff (with the app’s Finder icon remaining appl.icns). Fortunately Todd Ditchendorf, Fluid’s creator, made it easy to get our apps up there in the menubar and gave us the option to make them look prettier by splitting the app’s icon up with the menubar’s icon.

After fooling around in Photoshop for 15 or so minutes, I came up with this Leopardy icon (see the top-right):

• Download the icon here (Right-click and Save as or click and File -> Save as… once it loads)

This coupled with Yung Sang’s Hahlo userscript (adding Growl support, among other things), and you’ve got yourself a full-fledged, ass kicking, free (cough, Twitteriffic) Twitter client.

One thing I’d like to see from future versions of Fluid is the ability to use an icon bigger than 16×16, vertically at least. The icons are too close together in my opinion, and could use some spacing. Also context menu and Adium-esque menubar unread message counts will be an f-ing fantastic compliment to this already wonderful app.

UPDATE: Here’s a Gmail icon.tiff. Make sure you rename it. I plan on adding more menubar icons sooner or later.

UPDATE #2: A nifty search icon I’ve been using for Goosh: icon.tiff

UPDATE #3 (6/13): Two more icons, this time for Socialthing! (Note: the official one is great too!) and digg. (Rename to icon.tiff)