Since Twitter doesn’t seem to appreciate third-party developers anymore, I’ve decided to switch from the official Twitter app to The Iconfactory’s Twitterrific.  I really like it, but I absolutely can’t stand how the menubar icon turns from black to blue with every new tweet.  I constantly see it change out of the corner of my eye and subconsciously move the mouse to click the icon.  I’m not a fan of this incessant interruption.  Here’s a hack to disable it.

Quit Twitterrific, then paste these commands into Terminal (making a backup of the app first, especially if you purchased it via the Mac App Store):

cd /Applications/Twitterrific.app/Contents/Resources

# Backup menubar icons
for i in `ls | grep status_o`; do cp $i $i.bak; done

# Overwrite blue icons
for i in `ls | grep -e "^status_on.*tif$"`; do yes | cp `echo $i | sed 's/on/off/'` $i; done

If you also want to disable the activity animation:

cd /Applications/Twitterrific.app/Contents/Resources

# Disable activity animation
for i in `ls | grep -e "^status.*working.*tif$"`; do yes | cp status_on.tif $i; done

If you followed the first step, you can revert:

cd /Applications/Twitterrific.app/Contents/Resources

# Revert all changes
for i in `ls | grep bak`; do yes | mv $i `basename $i .bak`; done

You’ll have to repeat these steps after every update.

Iconfactory, if you’re reading, please add this feature!  I love the official client’s ability to only turn blue on @mentions and DMs.  Your app does many things so much better, and this feature is the only thing I’ll miss.

And Twitter, shame on you.