First of all, I would like to say hi to the community here. It seems like a wonderful bunch of people, and most of all the community is close to the developers (a major relif after the nonexistant dev-community relationship with America's Army (a FPS game), not to mention the "mushroom-treatment" the mac users were getting). I have almost used up my 8 hours, and this game is really fun, and I am definetly going to pay the $10/month (The servers are excellent lag-wise (because I have seen none and the pings are amazing compared to AA), so I guess it is worth it.

Anyways, when I first started playing, I really wanted to see a capship. I heard somewhere that the capship spawns every time a dev gets on. So, being the hobby-programmer that I am (I have made four or five support apps for America's Army, with two more in the pipe at the time of writing), I decided to make a menubar buddylist application. I have been watching it on-and-off for awhile (so far nothing :( ), but I decided to clean it up and make it public. So, here goes:

All three below downloads are distributed under the (most recent) GPL, and there is no warranty.



The double-clickable application:
http://jjoo.no-ip.com/VOBuddy.zip
Source:
http://jjoo.no-ip.com/VOBuddy_Source.zip (heavily commented)
For those of you who want a php-indicator:
http://jjoo.no-ip.com/VOBuddy_Indicator.php.zip



And also don't go to my website, I made it many years ago and its embarrassing ;).

Instructions:
Step 1) Double click the icon of the application in where ever your downloads folder is
Step 2) Now you see an extra status bar item in the top bar thingy. Click on it and select preferences.
Step 3) Configure to your liking, click on the "Buddies" tab to add buddies (or parts of buddy names, both work)
Step 4) Either hit refresh, or wait for it to do that by itself

Yay, now its working. The icon is red if no buddies are online, green if there are (if someone cares to make better small icons they are in the Source.zip). However, when you logout, the menu item will go away (I didn't want to use NSMenuExtra because of the imminent release of tiger and the chance that it will die if I used something that officially didn't exist). So add it to your user's startup items (System Prefs>Accounts>Your User>Startup Items tab). Also, it doesn't show in the dock, so to quit it you hae to go into its prefs and select quit.

PS
Devs, if you would be so kind could you make either a page with just the buddies on it (comma or some other char seperated), or even a socket-connection, it would be mutually benificial, as it would reduce your used bandwidth as well as that of the users...

PPS
If someone wants me to add graph-functionality, I can...

Nifty little widget there. I'm thinking I'm going to have a poke around the code a bit later. I can think of some different ways to integrate it into various things. Growl comes to mind at the moment. I also wonder about turning it into a script of some type for use with GeekTool. Might make an interesting Dashboard/Konfabulator widget too.

Also, I just made some slightly improved small size icons for the menu bar. I just took the large size ones and scaled them down with Gimp. They seemed to come out a little cleaner. I'll send you the new versions if you want, though the change is trivial to make. Thanks again for sharing.

Ok, that would be great if you could email it to me, my e-mail is jjoonathan@gmail.com :)

Right now, I am looking at the Growl docs, and I think Il make a widget too for it (or you can do that, the code is probably the simplest application I have made since the AppleScript days)... though I am not all that great with graphics (I used gimp to scale the ones that I currently have, though I must have done it a few pixles too wide or something...)

UPDATE:
GeekTool seems like just a system log monitor so this will be simple, I will just pop some NSLogs in there.

I think growl will be fairly easy to add also. I will update this post again when I get it working.

UPDATE 2:
Both are now working. Re-download if you want.

Hi Joonathan. I have to admit, I have left AA to play Vendetta. I still have the current AA on my machine but i hardly ever play it between VO and Doom3.

See you in the game.

I agree with your comments about the Devs too. I love the fact that it's not a secret what they're up to and busy on.

Have i mentioned tonight that the Devs rock yet?

no?

The Devs rock!

Yep, I am pulling away from the AA community too... il see if I can get some more people to also come ;).

See you in game.

The Devs rock x2!

jjoonathan,
Haven't had a chance to look at the new version yet, but I thought I would let you know that GeekTool does a lot more than just monitor system logs. It can also run any shell command and either display the output or an icon indicating the exit status. It takes a bit of poking around to discover the various ways in which it can be used.

Yes, I know. but it seems the best way to integrate it with VOBuddy is to just use it's log feature (otherwise I would have to create a small messenger binary or something alike). GeekTool's log viewer + Growl seems like a good solution for now.

I'm actually thinking I'd like to make a version of the code as a shell script of some sort for using it with GeekTool. But you are right, the log funtion is definitely the way to go with the app living in the menubar. I'm also planning a version which can be used as a sort of website guild roster for later on.

As for the shell script, I have to ask why... cross platform? And the app isn't living in the menubar, its living just like any other app, just it doesn't put it's icon in the dock (I didn't use a NSMenuExtra because it officially doesn't exist, and I don''t want to risk API changes).

As for php,
http://jjoo.no-ip.com/VOBuddy.php.zip
(instructions are in the php file, this is a quick and dirty indicator, I am making a bigger logging version.)

Thanks for the smoothed icons, I dunno why but my copy of the gimp seems to scale without antialiasing...

PS: imagemagick!

Thanks ;)

Ok, devs, if you get around to reading this... and you are feeling particularly kind, I would just like to lay out a protocol you could stick in that would make a reasonable bandwidth difference for the refreshes. Again, it just if you have time and want to help out, no pressure ;)

(I am using BSD sockets for fetching the pages anyways, so this could be over a socket rather than HTTP, shaving off a few bytes of header data, I really dont care)

char 1, 2, or 3 depending on Itani, Serco, or UIT
name (null terminated, naturally)

etc and it repeats. Or even better, you might add something in there with the account name so people could get all of a person's characters, or use their forum name for the buddylist...

Now, on average, for me alone (one person using the app), this would save 20,168,640 bytes of data per day. It goes like this: the difference right now (assuming that now is average) between the size of the fetches for each protocol is 7,003 bytes. Multiply that by 2 per minute, 60 per hour, and 24 per day, and you get the ~20MB/day/person bandwidth saved figure.

Calculate it the other way around instead - 30 users =~ 1 request/second extra for the webservers, for very little gain.

Nice idea, but I'd kindly suggest hiking the time between requests up a notch. Five minutes, perhaps? (If you're more desperate than that for a given user, it's time for a 12 step program, perhaps..? ;-)

You see the option at the top of the preferences called "Number of seconds between scans" ;)

alright alright JJoo...I just had to get my but over here and try this thing out. So yes, Im trying it after hours on google searching for this dam site. Anyway, lets see how good this game is!

- CHIEF

hello! (and a frigate spawns if you ask a guide or a dev to spawn em' ) :D

jj, VOBuddy disables my "a" key. No matter the program the small "a" doesn't type. Shift a works but no small "a" when the buddy is running. (10.3.9)

Can anybody host this program somewhere? The url in the first post doesn't work anymore.