macOS Changing App Menu Colour

[ScottieDog]

Hello,

I am using an older App on Monterey, it is called "Lovers Clock" - it has black text showing a second clock on the top menu bar. All my menu bar items are white except for this one App, I would like to change its text colour to white too, if possible.
Can I go into the APP settings somehow and change the text colour to white by over-writing some of the code?

I have ctrl-clicked the APP and then selected "Show Package Contents" but not sure where the settings might be?

I wonder if anyone can help me, please?

 

[ScottieDog]

This is a download of the APP itself, if that helps?

LoversClock for Mac, Allows you to see multiple digital clocks set to different time zones.

A simple application that allows you to add multiple digital clocks with different time zones to your menu bar.

macdownload.informer.com

 

[Red Menace]

The only settings are what the preferences provide. The application executable is a compiled binary file, and the nib file is also compiled, so changing any of it would not be trivial.

 

[ScottieDog]

The only settings are what the preferences provide. The application executable is a compiled binary file, and the nib file is also compiled, so changing any of it would not be trivial.

Thanks for your response, I had a feeling that it might be something like that.

Thanks for taking a look, I appreciate it. I'll just have to live with the black text against all the others being white, I doubt the app developer will be updating anytime soon.

May have a look around and see if I can find another similar app.

 

[f54da]

> nib file is also compiled

There used to be a way to reconstruct a xib from a nib file (nibunlocker) but probably won't work with anything post 2010. Worst case you can probably process inject (e.g. via ld_preload) and muck around with the internals from there.

 

[ScottieDog]

> nib file is also compiled

There used to be a way to reconstruct a xib from a nib file (nibunlocker) but probably won't work with anything post 2010. Worst case you can probably process inject (e.g. via ld_preload) and muck around with the internals from there.

This sounds interesting. Do you think it would be possible to inject the change of font colour? Is there somewhere I can read more about this and then test it? Any information is gratefully received.

 

[Red Menace]

I took a quick look in the bundle to see of there were any resources that could be changed (without a lot of work), but didn't see anything. You can open a .nib file in a text editor and take a look, but the entries these days are just internal references from the .xib file (which isn't included), and that doesn’t preclude the developer making settings programmatically. The compiled executable is the same way - you can take a look, but good luck finding a byte sequence that won’t break it.

 

[f54da]

This sounds interesting. Do you think it would be possible to inject the change of font colour? Is there somewhere I can read more about this and then test it? Any information is gratefully received.

Yes. If the developer set it programmatically, then it's trivial to change. Just throw it in a disassembler like hopper and either directly modify the executable to change the right byte sequence (will need to resign afterwards), or you can create a dylib which you can inject which will use obj-c swizzling to do the same thing. Even if it's not set programmatically, once the view has been loaded it results in an object hierarchy similar to the DOM, and you can explore it and override the font color from there. Using f-script is probably the easiest way to dynamically trace views.

It's not difficult, just requires you to be familiar with basic obj-c (zkswizzle is a good library to automate swizzling) and comfortable with doing disassembly (hopper's pseudo-decompilation helps if you'd rather look at c though).

Fyi code injection via simbl is not possible on monterey without disabling sip, probably easiest approach on the newer systems is to do via dyld_insert_libraries. And then update info.plist to automatically set the env variable when launching. Since it's an older app you probably won't have to worry about hardened runtime or entitlements.

 

[ScottieDog]

Thanks for your comprehensive reply. I think that lot is above my pay grade, unfortunately.
I really do appreciate your reply though and hope it can help someone else.