Home/ Questions/Q 160101
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-11T10:58:31+00:00

In my small app for Mac OS X I display some info in system

  • 0

In my small app for Mac OS X I display some info in system menubar. I use

statusItem = [   [[NSStatusBar systemStatusBar]    statusItemWithLength:NSVariableStatusItemLength]    retain ];

It works very nice and I can change the text with

[statusItem setTitle:[NSString stringWithString:@'Woo-hoo']];

But it uses the default menu font which is too big for my relatively unimportant info. So I decided to reimplement it with a custom view. I created a view in Interface Builder.

Unfortunately, however, when I set it as a view for my menu item with

[statusItem setView:myView];

it just displays a white bar in the menu instead of my thing. I tried to

[statusItem    drawStatusBarBackgroundInRect:[myView frame]   withHighlight:NO];

with no success.

In trying to figure out whether a problem is with the view itself or with the way I assign it to the menubar, I created a window and did

[myTestWindow setContentView:myView];

This one worked seamlessly. This makes me think my view is OK 🙂

So, what else can I try to make the menu item display my own view?

Thanks!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. It happened to be some weird side-effects of window-view autosizing setup in Interface Builder (let’s call them size-effects). In the Inspector you can setup how subviews get resized upon superview sizing. And so it was somehow broken in my case, such that when window gets small enough (menuitem-high), my elements just got drawn outside of the window’s frame.

    I re-configured the sizing in IB, eliminating all the automatics I don’t need, and now it works perfectly: the view from IB gets displayed inside a menu item.

    • 0