change MENU BAR ICON colour when connected?

havinabubble

feature request (unless there is already an option I couldn't find?)
but could we get the MENU BAR jelly baby to turn GREEN, from black, when connected? 

I know Notifications pops a GREEN square up, but I often miss it and have to manually check before I open any apps.

It would be far simpler to know I've an active VPN if the menu bar icon changed colour while I was connected

TIA

tomeworm

You're not the first one to request this. I requested it over two years ago, as have multiple other PIA customers over the months. It's not rocket science. Out of frustration with PIA's lack of response I created my own PIA menu bar icons -- red, yellow, green. Makes it pretty obvious whether you're connected or if your connection has dropped. The PIA icons are anything but intuitive, which for a Mac bigot like me is completely unacceptable. I even offered what I made to PIA and suggested they use them. Again, no reply.

@sn0wmonster

Max-P

I don't know much about Mac, but according to the directory structure of the app it seems like the icons are intentional to match the top menubar's other mostly greyscale icons. The icon files are in ~/.pia_manager/pia_tray_files. Copying over the colored images on top of the Mac-specific ones will probably do it.

tomeworm

True, but the average Mac user may feel a bit intimidated about having to do all that. Why not just comply with our request like we've been asking for? Or if ya'll are feeling so nervous about using colored icons (not really a scary prospect at all since there are plenty of other apps that do so, including even Apple's own Siri, Keyboard Prefs, etc.) why not make it a user select-able option (like I've also requested before)?

Thanks at least for responding, Max-P. That's more than any PIA staff have done before on this request.

[Deleted User]

@tomeworm Thanks for tagging me in on this one. I wasn't aware of this issue and it seems like one of those "duh" things too. Sorry no one got back to you in the past.

@havinabubble I don't fully understand why it wasn't solved already, but I won't dwell on it because a little birdy told me there's changes coming for the client so expect these and other commonsense suggestions to be implemented.

sn0w

tomeworm

Max-P said:

The icon files are in ~/.pia_manager/pia_tray_files. Copying over the colored images on top of the Mac-specific ones will probably do it.

Aside from what I've already mentioned, the problem with this approach is that every time a user updates the PIA app it overwrites   pia_tray_files. So they're right back where they started out with the monochrome icons. This is just one among several reasons why I abandoned the PIA app a couple years ago in favor of Viscosity.


tomeworm

@havinabubble until PIA implements your request you might want to consider installing BwanaDik. Handy little app and it's free.

p8476349

Well, here's v76 just released and...still no colored icon for Mac. Nice and colorful on Windows though.

p8476349

v80. Can the developer at least comment? Surely someone at the company must occasionally check the knowledge base.

p8476349

Sent this to Feedback: "A lot of Mac users care about the reduced visibility on the Mac client compared to Win and Linux. I find 9 specific threads using Google. Can we please get the same look that the other OSes have? I'm not finding any Mac users who value elegant, sophisticated, muted, difficult to discern greys rather than functional, obvious colors.  Thank you."

Got this reply: "
Thank you for contacting us. Currently, we have no information available regarding possible upcoming changes to our service such as new server locations, services, features, etc. However, I'll send a note to our developers regarding your request; if an idea is requested often enough and is viable, they may consider it for future development."

I don't think they really read the questions, and to the extent that they read them, the position seems to  "We aren't actually going to engage with you the users from behind our wall, good luck raising enough support for it to be worth our while. We like to let anger and dissatisfaction boil over as a sign that it's time to get real about development.