Question

I made an app called Uberlayer. Users can use this single-purpose Mac app to overlay images on top of other applications.

I am using setMovableByWindowBackground to enable dragging the whole window by it’s background.

There is a little improvement I would love to make, as the application is now you can’t drag the window higher than the menubar, which can be little bit anoying. With normal window I can imagine it’s a good thing to have it lock to the Menubar, but for this use case it would be a good thing to be able to drag it higher.

Anyone knows how you can change this default window behavior?

Answer 1

Instead using -setMovableByWindowBackground: override -mouseDown: event like this:

- (void)mouseDown:(NSEvent *)event
{
    NSPoint originalMouseLocation = [window convertBaseToScreen:[event locationInWindow]];
    NSRect originalFrame = [window frame];

    while (YES)
    {
        NSEvent *newEvent = [window nextEventMatchingMask:(NSLeftMouseDraggedMask | NSLeftMouseUpMask)];

        if ([newEvent type] == NSLeftMouseUp)
        {
            break;
        }

        NSPoint newMouseLocation = [window convertBaseToScreen:[newEvent locationInWindow]];
        NSPoint delta = NSMakePoint(
                                    newMouseLocation.x - originalMouseLocation.x,
                                    newMouseLocation.y - originalMouseLocation.y);

        NSRect newFrame = originalFrame;

        newFrame.origin.x += delta.x;
        newFrame.origin.y += delta.y;

        [window setFrame:newFrame display:YES animate:NO];
    }
}

** Do not forget to hide window’s title bar (select window -> go to Attributes Inspector -> uncheck Title Bar ) because with it window can’t go higher than menubar. Or other solution would be to create borderless window.