Question

I want to create a program that consists of just a menu in the status bar (no dock icon or menu bar) that, when the user clicks on menu items, opens a window that allows the user to enter text (NSTextField and NSTextView).

I can make the program background only by setting the “Application is background only” property to YES in my Info.plist file, however, when I do this and display a window, firstly the window always appears behind other windows, and secondly I can’t type any text into it (text goes to whatever last had focus – usually a source file in Xcode!)

This is definitely not something as simple as the fields are not enabled. Simply changing the “background only” property to NO fixes the issue, but then I get a dock icon and menu bar which I don’t want.

Is what I’m trying to do possible or is there something about the background only mode that means my application can never receive text?

If it is possible what do I need to do to fix this?

Answer 1

From the documentation for LSBackgroundOnly:

You can use this key to create faceless background apps. You should also use this key if your app uses higher-level frameworks that connect to the window server, but are not intended to be visible to users.

So when they say “background only”, they mean background only.

The key you want is LSUIElement. Xcode describes this as “Application is agent (UIElement)”.

I personally can’t stand Xcode’s default behavior of showing me descriptions of some of the keys’ meanings. I recommend turning on “Show Raw Keys/Values”; then, Xcode will show you the real keys being used in the dictionary.