Mikael Konutgan

OS X Tutorial: A Menu Bar App

My post about making Simple Menu Bar Apps for OS X has been one of the most viewed pages on my site since I wrote it back almost 2 years ago. It was never a complete tutorial to begin with, more of a few tips and tricks of how to do it well and a link to an example app I had written.

Since then, Apple has released Yosemite, which changes the way the menu bar APIs work and makes showing custom views in a popover in place of a simple menu much easier. Also, as you probbaly know, we have a brand new language to write OS X apps with.

My tutorial was due an update, so I pitched the idea of writing a complete menu bar app for OS X tutorial to Ray, for whom I have been updating tutorials for iOS 8 and Swift and he liked it.

Check out the tutorial at raywenderlich.com. I show you how to build a complete menu bar app that shows inspiratinal quotes in a popover.