Parallels Toolbox Hide Icons tool compatibility issue

[bayramog]

Hello,

I am using Parallels Toolbox's Hide Menu Icons utility to make my menu bar organized since I have a lot of items on there. I put BetterDisplay's menu bar icon to there too. But when I try to use it, I can click menu bar icon and BetterDisplay's menu opens. I move my mouse from menu bar icon to menu itself then immediately menu disappears. So it become useless. The other apps with opening menu bar icons are working fine and I am facing the issue with only Better Display app.

[waydabber]

I am not sure what the issue could be, I am not familiar with this tool. Did you try contacting them about the issue? If they respond and provide me with a developer license for testing, I am happy to try to reproduce and understand the compatibility issue with their product. If they have any question regarding how the app behaves, please let them know they should contact me in this discussion.

[waydabber]

Just checked Parallels Toolbox. The issue seems to be that the app moves the app icon out of the viewable area somehow and since the app menu is a standard popover NSPopover anchored to the menu icon, it will disappear as well. However this is something the creators of the Hide Icons tool should have prepared for. I see that there are certain other icons the app and not hidden when the menu is open and the user moves the cursor away (these might be normal NSMenu apps or built-in features which might be whitelisted). There are certain other apps that have their icons hidden but the app uses NSWindow instead of NSPopover so the menu awkwardly remains visible + interestingly an empty box above it. Maybe the creators could whitelist BetterDisplay or improve upon the technique used by the app somehow (the popover associated to the menu icon created by the app should be easily detectable I think).

[waydabber]

Hi @bayramog - I tried a new approach te decouple the popover menu from the menubar item itself. This is not a regular approach but might help with this issue in Parallels Toolbox. If you are still a user of that app and would like to try a test build, pls let me know. Thank you!

[bayramog]

I can definitely test it! Thanks!

[waydabber]

@bayramog - here is a test build. Please let me know how the menu behaves with Parallels Toolbox Hide Icons tool enabled - is it any better? Thank you!

[DOWNLOAD REMOVED]

[bayramog]

I have tested it today for small period. It seems like, the menu tries to stay open for 1-2 seconds extra but then again disappears. When I compare with previous behavior, it is not instant disappearing.

[waydabber]

Lol. Well, that's an improvement. There is a logic that makes the app menu follow the icon periodically, apparently this tool puts it far off-screen. I'll try to add a protection against that so we can see if it helps.

[waydabber]

Hi @bayramog,

here is an updated test. I added two additional protections:

• If the menu is boxed into the main screen
• If the menu icon is rendered outside of the main screen, the app menu won't try to follow it.

I hope this will make the app menu persistent with Parallel Toolbox's software. Let me know whether this works! Thank you!

[DOWNLOAD REMOVED]