Inconsistent Size of Status Bars in OS X

20th January 2004

I’m playing with adding a status bar to my Cocoa application, similar to those in Xcode and Mail, but I’ve noticed they seem to be a full 2 pixels different in size.

The screen shot shows Mail underneath at the left and Xcode on top at the right. Mail’s status bar is 2 pixels smaller than that of Xcode.

Cocoa doesn’t provide a standard way of creating such status bars, and as I can see, the way to go is to enclose the status items in an NSBox and (un)hide this view, resizing relevant views below. This leaves most visual aspects, including all dimensions, up to the designer.

I’m not sure which one is the right one, so what to do about the size of my status bar? With the absence of consistency within Apple’s applications I guess I’ll just have to choose one and go with that. I’ll probably follow suit with Mail, partly because that’s what the majority will be used to, but mostly because it’s the smaller.

Update: I’ve updated the picture and thrown Finder into the mix (in the middle). Finder manages to be a different size again, using the 1 pixel gap between Mail and Xcode’s status bars. It also looks like Finder’s status bar may be a lighter colour than those of Xcode and Mail. I’m a little surprised that they’ve managed to achieve such variation between their applications over there at Apple.

Now I’m not sure which application I should imitate. Maybe I should come up with my own style as Apple seems to do with each of their applications.