Question

I’m want to create a menu for a status bar item like the one seen in Tapbot’s PastebotSync application:

Does anyone have any ideas how to achieve the custom area at the top of the menu which is flush with the top?

I’ve tried/thought of a few potential ways of doing it:

• Standard NSMenuItem with a view – isn’t flush with the top of the menu
• Some hack-ish code to place an NSWindow over the area at the top of the menu – not great as it doesn’t fade out nicely with the menu when it closes
• Abandoning an NSMenu entirely and using an NSView instead – haven’t tried this yet but I don’t really want to have to make some fake buttons or something that act as NSMenuItems

Anyone have any better ideas or suggestions?

Thanks!

Answer 1

In case anyone comes looking, I posted a solution to this at Gap above NSMenuItem custom view

Here’s the code:

@interface FullMenuItemView : NSView
@end

@implementation FullMenuItemView
- (void) drawRect:(NSRect)dirtyRect
{
    NSRect fullBounds = [self bounds];
    fullBounds.size.height += 4;
    [[NSBezierPath bezierPathWithRect:fullBounds] setClip];

    // Then do your drawing, for example...
    [[NSColor blueColor] set];
    NSRectFill( fullBounds );
}
@end

Use it like this:

CGFloat menuItemHeight = 32;

NSRect viewRect = NSMakeRect(0, 0, /* width autoresizes */ 1, menuItemHeight);
NSView *menuItemView = [[[FullMenuItemView alloc] initWithFrame:viewRect] autorelease];
menuItemView.autoresizingMask = NSViewWidthSizable;

yourMenuItem.view = menuItemView;