Since OS X 10.5 custom views have been allowed in menus. This adds a lot of flexibility to menu items that was not previously available. One example of this in practice is Snow Leopard’s Finder label color picker. Similar functionality is required for many applications. It can certainly be achieved in a less elegant way using sub-menus containing the names of the color labels available, but why not do it better? The example I’ll give here more closely resembles Aperture 3’s label colour picker menu item tha
The code is based on Apple’s MenuItemView sample code . Since much of the code comes directly from the Apple code, this post is mainly to demonstrate:
The basic concept is that a a custom NSView can be embedded into a menu. This example uses an NSView subclass called CCTColorLabelMenuItemView.