I've been asked to add a menu bar to our ARC app's chrome window. So, two questions:
Is this possible?
If so, how would one define and interact with it?
To clarify, this would be similar to the drop-down menu that the usual Chrome window has in the top-right corner but it would contain custom entries.
No there's no way to add a menu button in the top bar. The functionality you're describing sounds similar to an action bar, which is the preferred way in Android to add a menu in the app (as an overflow list), since navigation bar menu keys are being phased out: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/say-goodbye-to-menu-button.html
Related
I know I can "auto hide menu bar" in system preferences, however, what I like to do is hide items like this repository.
https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
This repository can hide items on right, but I wonder if I can hide left items (which are application menus).
Any idea is appreciated.
As for application menus on the left, those can't be hidden, I'm pretty sure.
Applications often have the option to enable or disable their menu bar helper app in the main preferences. If that doesn't help, e.g. if it's a full-fledged menu bar app, not just a helper, then to my knowledge the only solutions are Hidden Bar, which you mentioned, and Bartender.
I'm using the latter, and it does a very fine job. You have four options in Bartender's preferences:
Show (default macOS behavior)
Hide (menulet will be hidden in a special Bartender secondary menu bar, accessible via the triple-bullet icon ยทยทยท on the far right)
Always show (menulet will be visible in the main macOS menu bar as well as the secondary Bartender menu bar at the same screen position)
Always hide (menulet will be completely hidden)
Some older menulets seem to switch their position occasionally, e.g. after wake-from-sleep, and Bartender isn't yet able to fix the position of BitBar instances. But for the vast majority of menu bar apps and helpers it will work just fine.
I have a menu bar only application. On the first time the user runs the app I want to create an animated arrow pointing to my app's icon on the menu bar.
The first idea I had was to create a NSPopover showing the arrow but that is obtrusive per se because I don't think I can make the popover invisible at all. I just want to make an arrow moving up and down pointing to my app's icon on the menubar and that must be App Store compatible.
Is that possible? How?
You can create a borderless transparent window and set its level to screen saver and set it to ignore mouse clicks. Within this window you can draw your arrow, again use a transparent content view. Look up the docs on NSWindow, NSView etc. to construct this.
Alternatively you can change the menu bar icon of your app itself - switch it, highlight it, animate it. This is the typical way a menu bar app attracts attention. Look up NSStatusItem and NSStatusBarButton.
HTH
I am building a preferences window for my app and would like to achieve the same "look" as the NSToolbar that Finder uses. When selected, the toolbar buttons in Finder look "pushed in". On the right-hand side of the image is my preferences window - you'll notice that even though General is selected it does not look "pushed in". How do I achieve the look of Finder (and most other built-in apps)?
Thank you,
CS
When you build the toolbar in Xcode you add toolbar items to it. Each toolbar item can be customized in the right pane of Xcode. Choose "Selectable" as behaviour and it works as you expect.
XCode works in mysterious ways (at least to me).
I simply want to create a Preference pane in my app. When I run my app, the stock menu bar comes up (Apple, MyApp, File, Edit...) and the "Preferences" menu item is grayed out. It makes sense since I haven't started playing with it.
How on earth do I add/remove/activate/inactivate menu items? I'm not talking about adding anything new, simply using what should be there.
Thanks in advance.
NSMenu has "Auto Enable Items" enabled by default. That means if the menu item does not have it's action message hooked up, it will appear grayed out. So in your case, you would simply set the Preferences menu item's "Sent Action" to whatever action shows your preferences window. This can be hooked to some sort of showPreferencesWindow: method of your AppDelegate, or directly to the showWindow: method of a window controller.
To dynamically enable/disable menu items the best way is to implement the NSUserInterfaceItemValidation protocol which is excellently documented here
Edit: Your app's menu bar items live in the MainMenu.xib file. The menu bar appears as a "Main Menu" object on the left hand side (if you're using Xcode 4) Simply click on the items to modify them, and you can Ctrl+drag connections to and from them like any UI object.
I wrote a little app that lives in the NSStatusBar. I want to have a global shortcut that when hit, the menu bar's content is displayed, exactly like the behavior of spotlight.
I have added a global key shortcut to my application, but I am unable to get the meun bar to display. How can I do this? I tried with "popUpContextMenu" , but that method displays the menu in the bottom left hand corner, I want the menu to open up right under the NSStatusBar menu icon.
You can do it, apple provides a method for it popUpStatusItemMenu:
I don't think there is a supported way to do this without perhaps using the Accessibility framework to simulate a click on your status item. Regardless, it's probably not a good idea to abuse a menu in this way.
The Spotlight menu bar item does not use an NSMenu, it uses a custom window/view. You might consider going this route if you have some sort of custom view to display.