[Uncle Skeleton]

I had tried before to add buttons on top of images and similar things in my NSViews intended for use in NSToolbarItems, and it wasn't working. Then the other day I got the idea to layer the image on top of the button and lo and behold it worked! (the layering worked backwards when actually running the application). But this has me worried now; is this just a bug that one day Apple will fix and suddenly I'll have to redo my nib file, or worse I'll need two nib files, one for before the OS update in question and one for after? Has anyone else ever even run into this issue?

[Rickster]

Though Interface Builder has Bring to Front / Send to Back commands, the Cocoa view architecture doesn't actually doesn't make any provision for layering, so there's no guarantee what order things will appear at runtime.

The only way to be sure about this sort of thing is to make the view that's on top be a subview of the view on the bottom. I think you still can't do this in IB (it has this hardcoded notion of what controls are "supposed" to be container views, but really any view can), but it's pretty easy to set it up in IB and then swizzle the containment at runtime. (This is how we do the popup-arrow trick in OmniWeb's back and forward toolbar buttons.)