Popup jumps to the left when using the menubar manager app ICE

[moritzWa]

OS: macOS Tahoe 26.2
BetterDisplay Version: Version 4.1.1 Build 47018

[waydabber]

Are you maybe using third party apps that auto-hide the app menu? The menu is anchored menu icon, so if this goes away (some third party apps use hacks to move the icons off-screen) the app menu will try to go with it.

[moritzWa]

yes, https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
But I don't have this problem for any other menu application. Just tried a few.

[waydabber]

Yeah, it's an Ice problem. Afaik there is a whitelist and BD is not on it. You should consult the developer or add the app manually.

[moritzWa]

Can you please do that? I'm a BetterDisplay customer and don't have the time to...

[waydabber]

No, I think the app (Ice) has a whitelist, some other user with the similar issue mentioned that there is an option in the app which you can use to add an app to it. Isn't this the case? I am not an Ice user and I have no idea what the app does or how it works. :)

[moritzWa]

I just paid you $20 for a license. I expect stuff like this as part of the active maintenance of this application. Esp. when multiple users requested this. Also, you should try Ice, it's great.

[waydabber]

I am sorry, I think there is a misunderstanding. Since I am not the developer of Ice, I can't add my app to its whitelist. However afaik Ice has a configuration option where you can add any app to a whitelist or configure Ice not to interfere with an app - including BD. But I may be mistaken. So far I had only one user having a similar issue and he said he was able to solve it by adding the app to Ice's whitelist (I think - but I can't find the chat about it so I might be confusing things).

But since Ice's developer is on GitHub, it might be best to simply ask him about this issue and how to fix this.

@jordanbaird - can you help us with this problem? Thank you!

[jordanbaird]

This does look like a bug in Ice. @waydabber is correct about the icon being moved offscreen.

Specifically, the culprit is the "Smart" rehide feature, which rehides visible items when you click outside of an open menu. Since BetterDisplay uses a custom menu implementation, it isn't being recognized by Ice. I try to account for this, but it's hard to take every possibility into consideration. I've tried to avoid using a whitelist or any other app-specific workarounds, as that gets tricky to maintain, but it might be time to consider something like that. I also have a few ideas to improve how Ice filters mouse events that might resolve this and make conflicts a lot less frequent in general.

I still need to do a few more things to get Ice back to full functionality in macOS Tahoe, so that takes priority, but once that's done, I can make those changes.

@moritzWa - in the meantime, you can work around this by disabling auto-rehide, or by changing the strategy to one of the other options. In my testing, "Focused app" seems to work well, but you might want to experiment to see what works best for you.

[jordanbaird]

@waydabber A quick fix you could do on your end to help Ice recognize BetterDisplay's menu is to give the menu's window a title. Ice currently filters out untitled windows as part of an older implementation (shouldn't be necessary anymore, but it still happens). I will definitely still fix things on my end, but you might be faster with an update.

[waydabber]

Hi @jordanbaird - thanks for the responses. Can you help me how can I reproduce the issue? I have Ice running, "Automatically rehide" enabled with "Smart" strategy, and the BetterDisplay menu just seems fine - although the problem might be something else as the menu does not hide automatically, it stays there until I click on the Ice dot icon - maybe some other app prevents the menu bar from hiding?

The BD app menu is actually a heavily modified NSPopover - would it help if I gave the popover contentView window a title, like this?

popover.contentViewController?.view.window?.title = `BetterDisplay`

[waydabber]

Also @jordanbaird - Ice is a nice app, congratulations!