Balsamiq

Creating a Mac Menubar App for Pivotal Tracker

I spend a lot of the day answering questions in GetSatisfaction and logging bugs in Pivotal Tracker. I also spend a lot of time on a Macbook Air these days when I'm shuttling my son around and working in coffeeshops, and I've been obsessing over keeping the machine light and clean inside and out.

Inspired by this clever idea about using the Basecamp Mobile site as a Fluid menubar app, I decided to do the same with Pivotal Tracker. There isn't a mobile view, but if you keep your columns collapsed, you can use it with relative ease, and you won't have to keep it open in a browser tab.

The result should look something like this:

Here's the instructions for doing this yourself if you have a Pivotal account.

Prepare

1. Download and launch Fluid from here: http://fluidapp.com/
2. Download a Pivotal icon. I found this one here on sneaky.me to be good, but if you want a black and white icon, you can click on this one I made and save it instead:

Create App

1. URL: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/
2. Name: Pivotal
3. Location: Applications
4. Icon: Select other and browse to the icon you saved above.
5. Click Create.
6. Success dialog window appears. Cick "Launch Now."
7. Sign in.
8. Select the menu: Pivotal > Convert to Menu Extra SSB, and click OK in the dialog window.

Pivotal icon should now appear in your menubar and you can click it to open Pivotal in a drop down window. Drag the grippie in the corner to change the window size. Use two-finger scrolling to move in the window, because window scrollbars will be supressed.

Advanced Set Up (if necessary)

1. With Pivotal App launched, select the menu: Pivotal > Preferences.
   Select Advanced icon.
2. Second radio button should be selected, "Allow browsing to URLs matching these preferences patterns."
3. If not in the list, add: *pivotaltraker.com*

Hope you find it useful? I think it's an efficient way to keep it available all the time, while still keeping my browser tab count down.