C H A P T E R 4

Menus

The Application Menu

The application menu, new in Mac OS X, contains items that apply to the application as a whole, rather than to a specific document or other window.

Figure 4-7 The Mail application menu

The Application Menu Title

To help users identify the active application, the application menu title is in boldface.

In order to fit within the allotted menu bar space, the application menu title should be one word, if possible, and a maximum of 16 characters (128 pixels wide in 14-point Lucida Grande Bold). If the application name is too long, provide a short name (16 characters or fewer) as part of the application package. The Hide, Quit, and About items should also use the short application name.

If you don’t provide a short name, the application name is truncated from the end (and an ellipsis is added), if necessary. For more information about how to provide a short application name, see Inside Mac OS X: System Overview, available at the Mac OS X developer documentation website.

54Standard Pull-Down Menus (The Menu Bar)

Apple Computer, Inc. June 2002

C H A P T E R 4

Menus

The Application Menu Contents

■About <Application Name>. Opens your application’s About window, which contains copyright information and version number. (For more information, see “The About Window” (page 92). If you’ve specified a short name (see “The Application Menu Title” (page 54)), use it in the About menu item; use the full application name in the About window.

■Preferences and other application-specific items. Preference settings are user-defined parameters that your software remembers from session to session. Preferences can be a way for your application to offer users long-term choices about how the application works; examples include whether to automatically save files periodically and whether to check spelling as the user types.

In the application menu, put all commands that provide access to your application’s preference dialogs first, followed by application-specific items. Put a menu separator between the About command and the Preferences command. If your application provides document-specific preferences, make them available in the File menu (see “The File Menu” (page 56)). Most document-specific preferences should have a unique name, such as Page Setup, rather than Preferences.

Use Command-, (comma) as the keyboard equivalent for your application’s Preferences command.

Note: Your application should present its own preferences dialogs. Applications may add panes to System Preferences only if the application’s preferences apply to the system or to the user’s environment as a whole. Such exceptions might include an input device that doesn’t have its own interface or a server application that always runs in the background. For more information, see Inside Mac OS X: Preference Panes, available on the Mac OS X developer documentation website.

■Services. The Services submenu provides a way for one application to offer its capabilities to another application. For example, a user could select a name in a document and choose a Services command that looks up the name using an LDAP server, starts up an email application, and opens a new message window with the found email address in the To field.

For more information, Cocoa developers should see the Programming Topic “System Services” and Carbon developers should see Inside Carbon: Setting Up Your Application to Use the Services Menu, both available on the Mac OS X developer documentation website.

Apple Computer, Inc. June 2002