GenMoX

GenMoX is a general monitor for MAC OS X. The Mac menubar is a perfect location to place widgets such as "weather info" and "now playing". There are lots of special apps for menubar to monitor a specified kind of infomation. Here, I present you a more generic and powerful widget: GenMoX.

How it works

When a GenMoX instance is started, it's told to execute a program every few seconds. Both program and interval are configurable through command line arguments. For example:

genmox 1800 "weather-monitor-helper.py shanghai"

The first argument is monitor interval in seconds. The second argument is the program to be monitored. So this launch string means: run weather-monitor-helper.py shanghai every half an hour (1800 seconds).

Notice: the program to be monitored should be put in quotes together with its arguments.

The program to be monitored can be written in any language as long as its output is a JSON string in the following format:

{
    "image": "/path/to/normal/image.png",
    "altimage": "/path/to/alternate/image/when/highlighted.png",
    "menus": [
        {
            "click": "",    // empty click command causes menu item disabled
            "text": "Disabled Menu Text",
            "keyboard": "",
        },
        {
            "click": "",
            "text": "",     // empty item will be ignored
            "keyboard": "",
        },
        {
            "click": "",
            "text": "-",    // this will make a menu separator
            "keyboard": "",
        },
        {
            "click": "/bin/sleep 5",
            "text": "Sleep",
            "keyboard": "s",    // shortcut key will be "⌘-S"
        }
    ],
    "text": "Status Text",
    "tooltip": "Status Tooltip"
}

The image, altimage, tooltip and menus fields can be omitted. For more examples, refer to monitors directory in the source tree.

GenMoX is fully-customizable through any programming language. It's perfectly fine and can be quite useful if you just prepare a static JSON file and run GenMoX with:

genmox 100000 "cat static.json"

Screenshots

To this end, three monitor scripts have been developed.

Now Playing Monitor

Display now playing infomation of Music Player Daemon and provide basic controlls.

genmox 1 $(pwd)/mpd-monitor.sh

Copy the plist file to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ to run this monitor on login.

System Infomation Monitor

Display current CPU and memory usage infomation.

genmox 3 $(pwd)/sysinfo.sh

World clock

Show the current time in other timezones.

genmox 30 $(pwd)/world-clock.sh Asia/Shanghai America/New_York Europe/Zurich

Copy the plist file to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ to run this monitor on login.

Contribute

Patches and monitor scripts are welcomed.