In a recent usability post of Raluca Budiu, the common mobile app pattern of sliding menus is criticized: when the menu button is at the left edge and the content slides away to the right, then hiding the menu again requires the user to move her hand, and reading the menu items requires her to move her finger out of the way. With fat fingers, this is even more of a problem.
I thought it’d be straigthforward and simple to make a NSMenuItem from the main menu implement a toggle – be it a checkmark or switching “Show X” with “Hide X” conditionally. Turns out that’s not quite as simple as I had hoped. Cocoa bindings would work but make things complicated. Most stuff on the web uses view tags to find items in menus. That’s not my favorite solution for anything. menuNeedsUpdate wasn’t called when I had hoped it would, either. So I tried a few different setups and settled with a boring and verbose way to switch “Show X” and “Hide X” depending on a boolean flag the current NSDocument window exposes.