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.