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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T10:51:13+00:00

I have a Cocoa app I’m working on and I get a different result

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I have a Cocoa app I’m working on and I get a different result in appearance for the NSToolbar I am using for the main window.

Specifically, I’m using a search field as the last NSToolbarItem and, whereas under Snow Leopard it is displayed correctly:
enter image description here

it is cut under Leopard:
enter image description here

Looking at those two versions it appears that the spaces I put between the items are not respected under Leopard. I also saw that sometimes, after I make some update at the toolbar in Interface Builder, these changes are not mirrored in the running application even under Snow. I have to drag the default bar from the customizing menu in order to see them.

UPDATE
The reason for the NSToolbar not always mirroring what is in the .nib file resides in the autosave mechanism that was enabled for me, as NSGod suggested.

What can be the cause of this misbehavior?
Is there something about constraints, (minimum and maximum) sizes that I should have taken into account?
Feel free to point some documentation to me

UPDATE 2
Is there a way to programmatically introduce item and spaces into a NSToolbar or check the consistency (at run time) of those entered with Interface Builder?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    While I do recall having a couple of oddities with search fields in NSToolbars, I’ve never seen the behavior where the right side of it is cut off.

    Are the NSToolbarItems that are spaces the fixed one-unit space, or the flexible spaces?

    “I also saw that sometimes, after I
    make some update at the toolbar in
    Interface Builder, these changes are
    not mirrored in the running
    application even under Snow. I have to
    drag the default bar from the
    customizing menu in order to see them.”

    You need to keep in mind that if you’ve enabled user customization and autosave behavior in the toolbar, then when the user explicitly makes a change, it will be saved to user defaults. If you then re-arrange your toolbar in IB and run the app, it’s possible that the configuration saved in user defaults is overriding the default configuration you’ve specified in the nib file.

    What I usually do is during testing, delete the prefs file for my app so changes can’t be overridden. (FWIW, I usually use an AppleScript saved as an application that I keep in my Dock. It just runs a do shell script command which deletes the prefs file. Being a GUI-oriented type of person, it’s easier for me to just click it to have it run right before debugging. This version of the script asks for the prefs file to delete, though it can also be customized: http://www.markdouma.com/developer/DeleteAppPrefs.zip. If you’ve never run it before, you get the choose file dialog, and the chosen file is saved as an alias inside the actual AppleScript, so you’re not asked again. You can drag the icon onto AppleScript Editor to take a look at the script or change it).

    Anyway, then, if I’m going to release a new version of an app that uses a new toolbar layout, and want to prevent the config from being overridden, I’ll change the toolbar’s identifier (or autosave name) to something like “docToolbar2.0”.

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