Re: [Leopard] Spotlight/Help-like menu item

FROM : Ron Fleckner
DATE : Sun Jan 27 05:36:44 2008

On 27/01/2008, at 9:09 AM, Pierre Bernard wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I would like to create a custom menu item much like the search item 
> used in Leopard's Help or Spotlight menus.
>
> I thought this ought to be simple under Leopard, as it is now 
> possible to add an arbitrary view to a menu item. This however only 
> gets me 80% of the way and I am not even sure a working solution 
> lies in that direction. The problem is that the custom view does 
> not cover all of the menu item. There remains a border above and 
> below of my view.
>
> - Is there a way to stretch my view over those borders?
> - Where does the menu do its drawing? NSMenuItem is neither a view 
> nor a cell. I believe the custom view takes NSMenuItemCell out of 
> the loop.
> - What was the pre-Leopard way of doing this? I remember something 
> about going down to Carbon, but can't find much information on the 
> web.
>
> Best,
> Pierre


Hi Pierre,

I don't know about Leopard (yet), but on Tiger you can add any 
arbitrary image to a menu item.  In the code below, "colours" is a 
rainbow-like image 22 px by 100 px.  The variable "title" is an empty 
string.  This works on Tiger with no border around the image.  I 
haven't experimented with larger images, but they might work on Leopard.

   NSImage *myImage = [NSImage imageNamed:@"colours"];

   // Make the menu
   NSMenuItem *newItem = [[NSMenuItem allocWithZone:[NSMenu menuZone]] 
initWithTitle:title action:NULL keyEquivalent:@""];
   [newItem setImage: myImage];

Is that what you're after?

HTH,
Ron