How to create an interactive system tray "icon" in macOS with two clickable regions?

[abcd-ca]

I would like to know how another app is achieving some interactivity in my system tray (main top menu of macOS).

I've got a 3rd-party app on macOS that shows an interactive component as the app icon in the top menu of macOS. Instead of it just being an icon that you can left or right-click, it's a little wider and has a play/pause toggle button on the left and a clock on the right. You can click the pause button and it will pause the clock. If you click the clock, you get its larger popover window. How is this being achieved?

I've considered two possibilities:

• It's possible to use an interactive component instead of a png icon. If this is true, what's the API for that?
• If it's being faked, then the app is periodically updating the icon on the fly but I'm not sure how to detect clicks to different regions within the icon as the SystemTrayEvent::LeftClick position property shows the same coordinates no matter where I click on my png app icon that I tested.

Thanks for your insight

[FabianLars]

Do you have some example apps we can look at?

[abcd-ca]

Yes, this is a good example:

https://support.getharvest.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048180132-Mac-app-Tracking-time. See the video.

[evanwalsh]

Hi, I'm the currently the technical lead for apps at Harvest. If it helps, we do that by adding custom views to the NSButton that's within NSStatusItem. While we're doing it all in Objective-C right now, this is a good article for how to do it within SwiftUI: https://multi.app/blog/pushing-the-limits-nsstatusitem

Admittedly getting all this done from Tauri is outside of my expertise, though. I hope that helps!

[abcd-ca]

Super helpful @evanwalsh, thanks for the valuable insight

[farss]