Custom application launchers in Dock?

Custom application launchers in Dock? [RESOLVED]

Hi,

I'm wondering whether anyone has explored putting custom application launchers in their Dock. It was, of course, easy to add applications that already had an icon to the Dock (just by dragging), however I had something else in mind: I want to get an application launcher for XMMS in the Dock as well if possible. I have XMMS installed through FINK, and it works great, the only problem being that to launch it I must first start up X11, run /sw/bin/xmms, enter my password, etc, etc. Is it possible to avoid all that by programming an application launcher that I can keep right in the Dock? I've looked around (mostly just googling variations on this theme) and haven't found anyone who has done this... anyone have any hints/advice?

Thanks in advance,

nanoo

Look at an app called Platypus I believe that's what it's called. You can find it on macupdate.com

Thanks for the reply Murlyn - I think this Platypus is exactly what I'm looking for. I think I have a problem with the code however... I think to do with getting X11 to start up. I don't really know anything about programming - just the basics to get by on a Mac or *NIX system - if anyone can help me here I would really appreciate it.
So this is what I had in the file that I want Platypus to launch to get XMMS up and running:


So I created an application launcher with that using Platypus, but it gives as output:


Any ideas? Is it an X11 thing?

Thanks,

Daniel

I have no idea.. hopefully someone else does.

It is an X11 thing. The application that you are running does not have permission to display anything on your display window.

Normally you would do an xhost "ip address" (.i.e xhost 169.230.14.5) or xhost +. Then you would sst your display to your ip address. If you are uingin korn shell you would issue the command export DISPLAY 169.230.14.5:0. Bourne shell DISPLAY=169.230.14.5:0; export DISPLAY and c shell setenv DISPLAY 169.230.14.5:0.

Thanks rman, I think that exporting DISPLAY business is exactly what I need. I have hit another snag though...
I changed the script to:


and now I get the following output:


So the problem clearly is that it can't find xhost... and I can't find it either. I've looked all over for it - I can't find any of my X stuff anywhere on my system. Is there a place where these things normally live? I have XFree86 4.4.0 on my Mac system.

At any rate, if anyone knows where I can find the files for X11 (isn't there normally an X11 folder somewhere?), I'd really appreciate it - I think that's all I need to get this working ,

Thanks,

nanoo

Do you have the X11 windowing system installed on your system? Because xhost is part of that system.

Also in your script, you will need to modify the line "DISPLAY=169.230.14.5" to "DISPLAY=169.230.14.5:0".

Thanks for catching that typo rman - I neglected to check that.

Ok, so I found xhost (I had thought that my whole system was in the /sw - it turns out that the usr folder and others are in the root directory), and that settles that problem, however it doesn't seem to be able to open the display. This is the output it gives:


This is the script the launcher pointed to (I corrected the typo before running the launcher):


I checked that the script was executable (permissions are 755), but other than that I couldn't think of why launcher wouldn't work.

Any ideas? Thanks for all the help so far - I've got to be close at this point!

nanoo

You can try xhost + and see if that will work.

Thanks again for the help rman. Unfortunately xhost + didn't work - the same result as when I gave an explicit IP address.
However I think I made some progress this morning: I realized that it was only when I typed
in an xterm that I could get it to launch.
When I tried it in a terminal, I got the same error message that the platypus program was giving me. Sure enough, when I would run:
and then
in the xterm that came up, then xmms launched with no problems.

So of course the next thing I tried was to change the script to:

However I noticed that the launcher seemed to hang after starting X. So my problem is this:
Is it possible to write a program that will start X, then run new scripts in the xterm that comes up? When I do this manually everything works great. It's just a matter of getting it to work in one single script, that I can attach to a launcher.

As before, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

nanoo

Well, it turns out the solution to my problem was so simple...
I simply dragged the xmms icon in /sw/bin to the dock, and it worked perfectly (it knew to launch it with X11), and so the script problem has become totally moot.

Thanks for the help!

nanoo