Trouble matching the vibrant background of a Yosemite NSMenuItem containing a custom view

Question

I am attempting to add a custom view to an NSMenuItem in the OS X 10.10 Yosemite menu bar.

The custom view is simply an NSView background with an NSTextField “label”

Answer 1

Unfortunately there are currently several problems in Yosemite. As Matthes already mentioned, you can use labelColor() and secondaryLabelColor(). Using those colors do not cause the label to draw the strange background you are seeing.

However, labelColor() only works fine for VibrantDark because there the label color is white when a NSMenuItem is both highlighted and when not highlighted. With VibrantLight the labelColor is black and is therefore very difficult to read on on top of the blue highlight.

For the highlight color of the custom view of your NSMenuItem one might think that you should use selectedMenuItemColor() given its name. The problem with this is that the color doesn't actually match the menu highlight color that you see in NSMenuItems without a custom view. The color is completely wrong for both VibrantLight and VibrantDark.

Tl;dr: So how can you create a custom NSMenuItem that uses the exact same text color and highlight color? You can't. You should use labelColor() and selectedMenuItemColor() but the former only works correctly for VibrantDark, and the latter doesn't match at all.

I really hope I am wrong because I am trying to achieve the same thing :(

Edit: Here is an example project if people want to have a look.