my thoughts, musings, rants and discoveries . . .

So, have you been frustrated by the merger of Blogger and Google? I know I have. Despite the fact that I’ve been hosting my site via WordPress for a while now, I still maintain my Blogger account for the purpose of depositing comments with my signature details and avatar. However, this has become fairly cumbersome until today.

As the merge of Google and Blogger progressed, the end result was a push by Google to force people to create a Google account for the purpose of Email, Blogging, Online Payments, Calendaring, etc. Sounds like a pretty neat idea, until you think about it

In practice, Google has not simplified life. They’ve made it more difficult. Unless you’re willing to give up your little personalized comments signature, you’ve basically been forced to logout of Gmail in order to leave a comment. Let’s face it, we can all do this. But what a royal pain it is after a while.

Let me show you what I’m talking about. After all, a picture’s worth a thousand words, right?

Username based on Gmail login

Login signature based on my Blogger account

This may be a little too subtle for some of you, so I’ll spell it out. I tend to leave comments as “mike y” as opposed to “Mike”. And my mike y comments include my URL and my avatar.

Anyway, the way I solved this was with the use of Google Notifier for Mac. Now, this slick little application only works with one Gmail account at a time. And I have four of them. Three of them I use pretty regularly. Two of them I live/die by on a daily basis. And you can’t simply create a copy of the application for each account. Well, you could; but it wouldn’t work very well. You’d end up with one icon for all of your accounts. Hmm… how useful could that be?

Nope you’ve got to make some tweaks. But they’re pretty easy to make. First, you’ll need to right click on the application to Show the Contents of the Package.

Once you do this, you’ll see a bunch of files and directories as you would expect to work with, as opposed to just the application. Now you’re ready to begin making some edits.

The first file you’ll need to edit is Info.plist. You need to edit CFBundleIdentifier key to reflect that it’s for a different account, in my case it’s Wildernessvoice.

After you save your changes to this file, you’ll need to go into Resources=>English.lproj folders. Inside the English.lproj folder you’ll find MainMenu.nib. Go ahead and double click on it. This should open up within the Interface Builder tool inside Mac OS X. Once inside, you’ll want to look for the Instance titled BothMenu and double click it. This will show you the actual menu items that will be displayed when you click on the notifier icon. And if you’re lucky, the Cocoa-Menus box will also be open. You’ll want to grab one of the “Item” objects and drag it over to the drop down menu that should be showing. Drag the object and insert it under the Quit All Google Notifers menu item. Then double click on the new entry and rename it. In my case I renamed it with my email address.

Once the changes are made, save and exit. That’s it. You’re done. You can do this for each Google account you have. If there’s enough interest, I’ll dive in and find a way to solve this for you Windows users. But then again, maybe I can get some of you to make the switch