CAN Menu Bar

A minimal macOS menu bar app for CreativeApplications.Net members. It silently polls the CAN activity feed in the background and shows a count of new posts since your last visit — right in your menu bar.

Click the icon to open the activity feed in your browser. The counter resets and your "last visited" timestamp syncs with the website automatically.

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Features

• Live new-post count in the menu bar, refreshed automatically
• Configurable refresh interval (1 – 60 minutes)
• Clicking the count opens creativeapplications.net/activity/ and resets the counter
• Silent background polling — does not interfere with the website's own new-content indicator
• Credentials stored securely in macOS Keychain (never on disk)
• No Dock icon — lives entirely in the menu bar

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Requirements

• macOS 12 Monterey or later
• Xcode 14 or later (to build)
• A CreativeApplications.Net member account

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Build & Install

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/your-username/CAN-Menu-Item.git
cd CAN-Menu-Item

2. Open in Xcode

open CANMenuBar.xcodeproj

3. Set your signing team

In Xcode, select the CANMenuBar target → Signing & Capabilities → set your Team.

4. Build & Run

Press ⌘R in Xcode, or from the command line:

xcodebuild -project CANMenuBar.xcodeproj -target CANMenuBar -configuration Debug \
  CONFIGURATION_BUILD_DIR="$(pwd)/build" build

open build/CANMenuBar.app

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First-time Setup

1. Click the menu bar icon → Settings…
2. Enter your CAN username and an App Password
   • Generate one at creativeapplications.net → Edit Profile → App Password
3. Choose how often to refresh
4. Click Save — the app fetches your last-visit baseline from the server and starts counting

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How It Works

Every N minutes the app calls the CAN member profile API (/can/v1/member/{username}) and reads newActivityCount directly — the same value shown on the website dot and iOS app. No local date comparison, no feed polling. When you click through to the feed, it fetches once without silent=1 to stamp last_activity_visit on the server, keeping all clients in sync.

Credentials are authenticated via CAN App Passwords (HTTP Basic Auth). Your App Password is stored in the macOS Keychain and never written to disk.

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Launch at Login

After building, add the app to System Settings → General → Login Items.

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API

This app uses the CAN Member API. See CAN-API.md for full documentation.

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Version History

v1.2 (build 3) (WIP)

• Minimum polling interval raised to 10 minutes.

v1.1 (build 2) — 2026-04-16

• New-post count now reads newActivityCount directly from the member profile API — same source of truth as the website dot and iOS app. Eliminates local date comparison and feed polling for count.
• Fixed: count was always 0 due to server last_activity_visit timestamp being stored in local time instead of UTC (current_time('timestamp') → time() on server).
• Added app icon — light grey background with menu-app glyph.
• User agent updated to Activity OSX Menu Item/{version} ({build}).

v1.0 (build 1) — initial release

• Menu bar new-post counter with configurable refresh interval.
• Silent background polling via ?silent=1.
• Credentials stored in macOS Keychain.
• Click to open activity feed and reset counter.