Menus and Popovers in Menu Bar Apps for macOS

In this Menu Bar App tutorial you will learn how to present a menu and a popover that shows quotes from famous people. By Warren Burton.

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Where To Go From Here?

Here is the final project with all of the code you’ve developed in the above tutorial.

You’ve seen how to set up both menus and popovers in your menu bar status items – why not keep experimenting with using attributed text or multiple labels to style the quote, or connecting to a web backend to pull new quotes. Maybe you can discover how to use the keyboard to cycle through the quotes.

A good place to look for other possibilities is reading the official documentation for NSMenu, NSPopover and NSStatusItem.

One thing to consider is that you are asking your customers for a very privileged piece of screen real estate so while you might think its cool to have a status bar item your users might not feel the same way. A lot of apps manage this by providing preferences to show or hide the item. You can use that as an advanced exercise for yourself.

Thanks for taking the time to learn how to make a cool popover menu app for macOS. For now, it’s pretty simple, but you can see that the concepts you’ve learned here are an excellent foundation for a variety of apps.

If you have any questions, awesome discoveries or ideas you’d like to bounce off others as you configure status items, menus or popovers in your apps, please let me know in the forum discussion below! :]