I have a application with 2 windows (think like Twitter Timeline and mentions). For now I have been having the menus "Timeline ⌘1" and "Mentions ⌘2" in the "File" menu but this is kind of wrong. So I moved them to the "Windows" menu just by drag and drop.
When I open the application everything is nice, I can see both menu items unter the "Windows" menu. But then when I close for example the Mentions window the menu Item "Mentions ⌘2" disappears and I am not able to open this window anymore.
I have had a look at other applications and most of them have their Menu items to show the windows in the "Windows" menu and they don't disappear either after closing the windows. I am aware of the fact that Cocoa does soma magic with the "Window" menu item and it is quite ok in doing so (because I open some other windows which need to appear and disappear from there), but how can I make those two items kind of static so they don't disappear?
I finally found an answer, in order for them to not be handled by the Windows menu you need to call
[timelineViewWindow setExcludedFromWindowsMenu:YES];
[mentionsViewWindow setExcludedFromWindowsMenu:YES];
and after that add the Menu items to the Windows menu and they will not disappear anymore.
Related
I am currently creating a macOS menubar for an app without using any interface builder (no XIB/NIB files), just pure code. However I was expecting some items to be auto-generated during the start-up of the app. Items like "Start Dictation", "Emoji & Symbols" under Edit menu were existing as well as the "Enter Full Screen" menu item under the View Menu. But when it comes to Window Menu nothing was automatically generated, only the menu items I've set in the code. Do I have to enable some flags or options when instantiating a Window NSMenu so it automatically generates those items? I am new to macOS development so I feel like I am kind of lost. Thanks in advance.
The Window and Help menus are a little special in that they have their own NSApplication properties, so you will need to set them to your menus so that the system will know what they are.
For example, if you just create a window menu and add it to the main, all you will get are the items that you have provided. If you also set it as the application’s windowsMenu, in addition you will get all the stuff for moving, tab support, etc.
Setting NSApp’s helpMenu is similar, where a Spotlight menu item is added to the menu.
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 ··· 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.
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'm trying to update my GUI a little bit but don't want to run into porting problems later next year when a native Cocoa Port will be started.
On Windows/Linux it is common to drag items out of menus or being able to right click on a menu item and display a context menu for this menu item.
Is there anything like this on MacOSX.
Well, you can put a view into a menu item, and you can drag from a view, but I don't know whether those two will work together (i.e., whether you can drag from a view that's in a menu item).
More importantly, this isn't normal on the Mac, so you need another place to drag the item from regardless of whether you can support dragging from the menu or not.
I have a file listing in my application and I would like to allow people to right-click on an item and show the same contextual menu as Finder does. Is this possible?
The same functionallity but for Windows Explorer is discussed in How do you show the Windows Explorer context menu from a C# application?.
You can't extract the Finder's contextual menu in any stable way, no. Neither can you tell the Finder “show your contextual menu here, as if the user had right-clicked on this item”.
You'll have to make your own.
If I understand the question correctly...
Showing a custom icon and action in your Finder Context Menu is now possible in OS X 10.10 Yosemite via a Finder Sync Extension:
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/Finder.html