Xcode and Safari sport Touch Bar items to navigate back and forth. Have a close look: When you put two NSTouchBarItems next to each other, there usually is a gap. Between the navigation controls, there is a mere hairline divider, but not the regular fixed-width space. They are not realized via NSSegmentedControl, though. Compare the navigation buttons with the system-wide controls far to the right: volume, brightness, play/pause. (I’m listening to the 1980s Pop Radio on Apple Music at the moment, in case you’re curious.) The system controls are a NSSegmentedControl. They have rounded corners for the whole control, while the navigation buttons have rounded corners for every button. Also, the navigation buttons have the default button width.
Two years ago, I wrote about how I implemented a toolbar with NSSegmentedControl, much like Apple’s own apps have them since macOS 10.11 Yosemite. Last week I discovered my implementation was buggy: it did not work at all when you customize the toolbar to show “Icon Only”, i.e. hide the label text.
This post is part of a series on getting NSSegmentedControl to work in your toolbars. Earlier this week I posted how to create a segmented toolbar item with 1 label for each segment. Now some options in TableFlip depend on context: without a selected cell, you cannot remove the selection, for example. So I disabled some segments and it looked alright:
Ever wondered how Apple Mail’s NSToolbar achieves the effect of individually labeled buttons shown in groups? Update 2018-11-23: I discovered a flaw in the target–action-mechanism of NSToolbarItems. They don’t fire if the label is hidden. This post’s approach is still valid enough, but is now part of a series of posts on the topic, with the 3rd one providing a fix:
