Scriptable menu bar icons

Is there an easy way I can add custom icons to the menu bar status area? Ideally something like Growl (e.g., where you can just execute a command) but instead of notifications, just renders icons in the menu bar.

I'm mainly looking to draw numbers that I'd use to alert me of various things. For example, I can configure my email client to run a command/AppleScript to update the numbers when an certain kind of email arrives.

Something like this:

Solution 1:

I would suggest starting with this thread, which describes using Cocoa Objective-C calls from within AppleScript. There is an example Xcode project here.

And Launch is a complete application written in AppleScript that functionally does this. Its Xcode project file is here.

The basic premise is to generate NSMenuItem instances and add them to the system's NSStatusBar:

set statusMenu to (NSMenu's alloc)'s initWithTitle_("Launch")
-- (build and do stuff with the statusMenu here)
set sysStatusBar to NSStatusBar's systemStatusBar
set statusItem to sysStatusBar's statusItemWithLength_(32)
tell statusItem to setMenu_(statusMenu)
tell statusItem to setHighlightMode_(1)
set menuImage to NSImage's imageNamed_("icon.png")
tell statusItem to setImage_(menuImage)

_{AppleScript excerpt from Launch's source code, Copyright © Lee Hanken}

Solution 2:

Okay, I have made an app for this. It is on GitHub: 0942v8653/ScriptableStatusBar. Just keep the app running and use the sbar tool to set and remove items.

As the readme says:

sbar set face 😃 'Bye!:sbar remove face'

Creates a face in the status bar. The menu will have an option Bye! that runs sbar remove face getting rid of the menu it creates.

You can download a compiled version from https://github.com/0942v8653/ScriptableStatusBar/releases.

Solution 3:

You can also use RubyCocoa:

require "osx/cocoa"
include OSX

app = NSApplication.sharedApplication
statusitem = NSStatusBar.systemStatusBar().statusItemWithLength(NSVariableStatusItemLength)
statusitem.setTitle("aa")
app.run

Solution 4:

Another option is to use Rumps, a Python library that uses the Obj-C classes and functions.

http://rumps.readthedocs.org/en/latest/