Entourage 2008’s kid brother called My Day has a preference to either show its icon in the Dock or to show its icon in the Mac OS menu bar. Multiple posters in the microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage newsgroup and elsewhere have reported problems with making the change from Dock to menu bar. A MacBU developer for Entourage provided the fix.
My Day users who wanted a little less clutter were clicking its Preferences button and setting the Show on Mac OS menu bar option.
After clicking the OK button they received a notification that My Day settings were changed and that My Day must reopen.
Strangely, this message window displayed twice and when My Day reopened it was still appearing in the Dock and not in the Mac OS menu bar. The preference was not sticking. Several users, including myself, located the My Day.plist file in the Microsoft User Data folder and the com.microsoft.myday.plist file in the user Preferences folder and deleted them but this did not correct the problem. Furthermore, this was only affecting Standard Mac OS users but not Admin users.
Andy Ruff, Lead Program Manager for Entourage, responded to a newsgroup poster and said that to be able to make the change stick the user must have read/write permissions on the application’s bundle. That means all users, Standard and Admins, must be able to write to the My Day application inside the Applications folder.
How does the Standard user make this change? If he can log in as an Admin then he can make the change himself. But if he doesn’t know an Admin password he must have someone who is an Admin make the change. Note: Making this change will affect all Entourage users in every Mac OS account.
To change permissions on My Day I suggest using the Terminal application whether on Tiger or Leopard. It’s quick and painless and anyone can use it.
- Log in to your Mac with an Admin account.
- Make sure My Day is quit.
- Launch the Terminal application found in /Applications/Utilties.
- Copy the following line and paste it into the Terminal window:
sudo chmod -R a+w /Applications/Microsoft\ Office\ 2008/Office/My\ Day.app/
- Hit the Return key.
- Type your Admin password.
- Quit the Terminal application.
Now, launch My Day and select the Show on Mac OS menu bar option. When you click the OK button this time, the Do you want to repopen My Day? message should appear just one time and not two and the My Day icon should appear only in the menu bar. It will no longer appear in the Dock nor the application switcher.
Note: Requiring that Standard users be able to write anywhere within the Applications folder goes against Apple’s developer best practices. The purpose of keeping this folder read only to Standard users is to prevent changes, accidental and intentional, to programs and files that other users share.
Andy added his explanation for doing this in a later post:
“The reason this happens is the bit that determines if an app appears in the Dock is set within the application bundle's Info.plist. When you modify your pref, it modifies this bit. That bit is then read by Launch Services when you run the app. It's never been something that could be set at the user-level. In Tiger, this rarely was fine. Leopard changed the defaults such that an app modifying itself was much harder without user action. There might be a way for developers to do this at the user-level now in Leopard, but there's no documentation saying one way or another yet.”
Comments (3)
Posted on January 19, 2008 15:37
Bob:Great Fix!! Worked like a champ!!
Posted by Bob | January 19, 2008 3:37 PM
Posted on January 28, 2008 15:33
Andy:Will,
You always manage to help users with their Entourage issues, I have read many of your responses to get myself educated. Thanks! I found one blog today which will interest you as well. See:
http://blogs.technet.com/amir/archive/2008/01/27/entourage-2008-new-features.aspx
I highly recommend it, hope it continues, just mailed the author as well. :)
Posted by Andy | January 28, 2008 3:33 PM
Posted on February 27, 2008 10:03
Bill:My Day show tasks, but not my calendar. Any ideas on to get the calendar to show up?
[My Day does not show the calendar] Diane Ross
Posted by Bill | February 27, 2008 10:03 AM