Inside Contextual Menu Items, Part 1
by Steven Disbrow05/28/2004
Editor's note: In this first installment of a two-article series, Steven Disbrow helps you limber up your right-clicking finger and describes handy power user tips for two-button mousing on Mac OS X. In Part 2 this coming Tuesday, he'll show you how to create your own CMIs using Xcode.
I think it's safe to say that Apple Computer, Inc. makes the best one-button mouse in the world.
Yes indeed, Apple's Pro Mouse is truly a joy to use ... for about five minutes. After that, most folks over the age of five unplug the thing, put it in a drawer and hook up a two-, three-, four-, or five-button mouse so that they can get some real work done.
Given Apple's recent attempts to woo Windows users to the Mac platform, it's a wonder that Apple still doesn't offer a mouse with two (or more) buttons, not even as an option for "switchers." This would be a very smart move because if there's one thing that Window users love, it's right-clicking on things.
You see, in Windows, clicking the second (also called the "right") mouse button on an object almost always brings up a special menu containing options directly related to the object on which you are right-clicking. For example, right-clicking on a disk will bring up a menu allowing you to format the disk, eject the disk (if it's a removable disk), or rename the disk, among other options. These special menus are called contextual menus because their contents depend on the context in which they were invoked. (For example, you get a slightly different menu if you right-click on a folder rather than a disk.)
Mac OS X to the Rescue
Now, it's true that the Mac OS has had the ability to pull up a contextual menu or two for a while now. (I believe it was Mac OS 8 that introduced this ability.) But with Apple selling us nothing but one-button mice and forcing us to hold down the Control key when clicking (called "control-clicking") to invoke a contextual menu, or to install special drivers to use a two-button mouse, it's always seemed more of a "Me too!" implementation than a real attempt to catch up with this very cool Windows feature. Fortunately, with the release of Mac OS X, that changed in a big way!
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Related Reading 
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Even though Apple still insists on shipping nothing but one-button mice, Mac OS X has been supporting multi-button mice since the beginning. With Mac OS X, you no longer need special drivers to use these mice. Just plug in your multi-button mouse and not only does Mac OS X recognize that second button, but just about any object you right-click on in the Finder will have a contextual menu full of options that apply to that object. (Better still, any additional buttons on your mouse can be used in other parts of Mac OS X. For example, Exposé functions can be mapped to one of your additional mouse buttons. But that's another article.)
Of course, since Apple just recently got serious about contextual menus, the contextual menus in Mac OS X generally aren't as feature-filled as their Windows equivalents. Fortunately, Mac OS X has a solution for that as well; it allows you to create and install your own contextual menu items!
Once installed, a contextual menu item (CMI) will be called by Mac OS X whenever the user right-clicks the mouse. The CMI will then have an opportunity to examine the context in which it was invoked and report back to Mac OS X whether or not it should be included in the final contextual menu that the user sees. For example, a CMI could be written to only appear when the user right-clicks in a particular application (Safari, perhaps) or when the user right-clicks on a particular type of object (such as an Adobe PDF file). Programmer-created CMIs can have sub-menus (and sub-sub-menus) and can generally do anything that a clever programmer can trick them into doing.
In fact, there are already tons of cool, "can't live without 'em" CMIs available for Mac OS X. Just go to your favorite Mac software download site (such as MacUpdate or Version Tracker) and search for "contextual menu" and "CM". You'll get back dozens of neat CMIs that you can download and install on your system to make your life easier.
Installing Contextual Menu Items by Hand
Most CMIs that you download will come with an installer program that takes care of all the gory details of installation. However, some will require you to install your new CMI by hand. Fortunately there are only two places on your system where a CMI can go, so it's incredibly easy to do. Where you install your CMI depends on which of the users on your Mac you want to have access the CMI.
If you want every user on your Mac to have access to the new CMI, copy the CMI file into the /Library/Contextual Menu Items folder. (Note that CMI files will have an extension of .plugin, so look for a file with this extension in the materials that came with your CMI download. Checking any "Read Me" file that came with the download would be a good idea too!) You'll find this folder by double-clicking on your boot drive and then double-clicking on the Library folder.
If there isn't a Contextual Menu Items folder inside of the Library folder, simply create it and copy the CMI .plugin file into the new folder. (Note that you'll need administrator access to create this folder and/or copy a file into it.) Once the file is copied, all users of the system will have access to the new CMI the next time they log in. (You'll need to log out and back in yourself to gain access to the CMI.) Figure 1 shows the path to this folder on my system, along with the CMI that lives there. (Yes, it's one that I wrote myself.)
If you want only certain users to have access to the CMI, each user will need
to copy it into the Library/Contextual Menu Items folder in their
home directory. (You'll usually see this denoted like this: ~/Library/Contextual
Menu Items. The tilde (~) denotes the path to the home folder
of the current user.) So, let's say that you want to be the only one on
your system that can use the CMI you've just downloaded. Open your boot drive,
then open the Users folder. Inside there, you'll see a list of
folders with names matching the names of the users on your system.
In this case, double-click on the folder with your user name (it should have a house icon rather than a generic folder icon) to open it. Inside there, you should find a Library folder. Open that and look for a Contextual Menu Items folder. If it exists, copy the CMI's .plugin file into it. If not, create the folder and copy the .plugin file into the new folder. Then log out and back in to make the CMI available to all your applications. That's all there is to it! Figure 2 (below) shows the path to my ~/Library/Contextual Menu Items folder.
(Click for larger view)
Deleting a Contextual Menu Item
Getting rid of a CMI is simplicity itself: just delete the .plugin file and then log out and back in. That's it!
Troubleshooting Contextual Menu Items
Most CMIs will probably work as advertised, but occasionally you'll run across one that doesn't work the way you expect. So, wrapping up, I'd like to offer some tips for troubleshooting CMI installations.
First and foremost, it's important to realize that some Mac OS X applications don't support the CMI framework that Apple has defined, so any CMIs that you install simply won't be available from inside these applications. Most of the "big name" applications work fine, but two that don't work are Mozilla (and its derivatives, such as Firefox) and Dreamweaver MX 2004.
Why don't these applications work with CMIs? I honestly don't know the answer, but I suspect that it has to do with the fact that both are fairly old applications and that they haven't been completely moved over to use the new programming frameworks that Apple provides. Hopefully, this will change in the near future.
Another place that your Mac OS X CMIs won't work is inside the X11 environment. This isn't surprising, however: X11 is a completely different windowing system from Aqua, with its own contextual menu system. It doesn't know anything about the Mac OS X CMI framework and probably never will.
So, if those are the cases where a CMI simply won't work, what about the times when a CMI "works" all too well and behaves in bizarre ways? Well, there's a simple way to troubleshoot CMIs and avoid just this situation.
When I was talking about installing a CMI, at the end of the process I said that you should log out and back in to make the CMI available to all of your applications. The key part of this is the phrase "all of your applications." You see, in Mac OS X, each application loads your installed CMIs when that application is executed. So, for example, if you have the Finder and Safari running and you have GreatCM.plugin version 1.0 installed on your system, both of them have loaded GreatCM.plugin version 1.0. If however, you download and install GreatCM.plugin version 2.0, and then fire up, say, TextEdit, without first logging out and back in, the Finder and Safari will still be using version 1.0, but TextEdit will have loaded version 2.0!
Now, you could quit and restart both the Finder and Safari, so that everybody has version 2.0 loaded, but if you've got a lot of applications running, it's a lot easier just to log out and back in. (It's smarter, too! The new version could, for example, make changes to a shared preference file that would totally confuse version 1.0.)
However, you can use this behavior to your advantage. For example, if you download and install a new CMI, you don't have to log out and back in just to test it. Simply fire up a sacrificial application and test the CMI there before logging out and back in. (I like to use the Console because if there's a crash, that's the application I'll start next to track down what went wrong. Remember however, that these are contextual menu items, so your sacrificial application should be one that the CMI would normally work with.) If the CMI doesn't perform to your liking, simply kill the sacrificial application, delete the CMI's .plugin file, and you're back in business!
That's All For Now!
I hope you've found this introduction to contextual menu items interesting. In my next article, I'll show you how to actually program a contextual menu item so you can extend the power of your system with just a simple (right) click!
Steven Disbrow is the President of EGO Systems, Inc., a computer consulting firm in Chattanooga, TN.
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Showing messages 1 through 8 of 8.
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Biggest "switchers" fear...the one button mouse
2004-06-02 12:37:25 Prospero [Reply | View]
While I agree that the one button mouse is usable, I will say that it is also the thing that keeps Windows users from switching over. Here at work we have a handful of Macs. People are frequently stunned that I have a five button mouse on my Mac. I think a lot of people would convert if more of the computers at the Apple store had a multi-buttoned mouse attached.
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exposé made the difference for me
2004-06-02 06:13:14 benatong [Reply | View]
I have a small logitec trackball thing with two small buttons integrated with the normal left and right buttons. I assigned one to show the desktop and the other to show all windows.
At this point I kind of "expect" to be able to see the desktop with a flick of my index finger.
chuck
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Don't disregard RSI with multi button mouse
2004-06-02 04:18:13 Bartacus [Reply | View]
After having used the mac with its single button mouse for many years, I had to start using Windows. After a few weeks I started getting RSI indications.
Since then I switched backt to the Mac, using Virtual PC and since then the complaints are slowly dimishing.
Specially the use of the scroll wheel in combination with the right button mouse are straining your hand with micro movements.
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Simplicity or power
2004-06-01 08:35:19 bradrice [Reply | View]
I agree that a one button mouse is simpler and less likely to be used wrongly, but a three button mouse with a roller in the middle is really nice. I can quickly scroll web pages with the roller. For working on websites, I can right click on images to quickly view their properties in Mozilla. Sometimes people would prefer to trade simplicity for power. I'm glad Apple has built in contextual menus and the ability to add the mouse of choice to the OS.
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Feh
2004-05-28 23:09:28 freelancer [Reply | View]
I still can't understand why people want two, three, four, or five-button mice. I hate sitting down at someone's Windows machine with the stupid bazillion-button mouse, where you're never quite sure what's going to happen next time you accidentally push a mouse button you didn't mean to push.
I've got more than a hundred buttons sitting on my keyboard. The mouse is for pointing at things; it doesn't need more than one. I have no desire to turn my mouse into a second keyboard.
Multiple mouse buttons are a crutch to work around the horrible UI design of Windows. They are one of the biggest sources of confusion to the new user, too, as people who have done tech support will know all too well.
While contextual menus can be handy, since they are by their very nature hidden, overloading them is poor UI design. They should always duplicate functionality that can be found elsewhere.
But the ongoing whining about the Apple one-button mouse is just plain annoying. A whole lot of people like it better, myself included, and we really, really don't want the Apple UI to start assuming the presence of multiple buttons, or relying upon it, so let's just keep the multi-button monstrosities as add-ons for those who want them. They work just fine, so there's no need to complain about it.
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RE: Feh
2004-06-01 12:57:48 some-guy [Reply | View]
I can accept that some folks like their multi-button mice. They are free to buy them, and all the power to them. But I don't need more than one button. Personally, I am a laptop owner. I use the trackpad on my TiBook all day long (I have worn the paint off of the button). I can hit control and get a contextual menu if I want, or I can use keyboard shortcuts (my preferred method) to do things quicker than navigating the menus above.
Frankly, I think mice are pretty awful. I have owned a trackball (Turbo Mouse) for something like 10 years, and have never regretted the $100 I spend on the thing (I have had 2: 1 ADB and the other USB). Groping around on the desktop or having to look away from the screen just disrupts the flow of things.
But I don't program the buttons to do anything custom on the Turbo Mouse. For me, I don't know why I should bother to. I always forget what it they are used for. Chording, etc. is a big whatever to me. But that is me. If someone wants to make some kind of bizarre 2 foot tall rubber smurf that can have its various appendages programmed through a control panel so that, when you pinch its nose and left ear, it performs a copy, or scroll up and down by jabbing a fork in its left eyeball and wrenching it up and down, if it works for you, then have a good time with it.
This is not to disqualify the contextual menu plug-ins people have made. There are several third party ones I need every day, and I had started writing my own about 1-2 months ago. But you don't need a second mouse button to realize the value of contextual menus.
Contextual menus are a tool. They can be abused and polluted, as they have been in Windows (nasty interface inconsistencies abound), and they have been occasionally. Services are the same way.
