Is there any way to highlight the status bar item programmatically?

Question

I'd like to perform the following:
when I click on the status bar item (NSStatusItem) I want to highlight it (no menu) indefinitely and when the application loses focus I want to stop highlighting it.

Is there any way of doing this? I can't find it, tbh.

Answer 1

You can probably do this with a custom view that sends the status item a drawStatusBarBackgroundInRect:withHighlight: message.

I doubt there's any way to do it without a custom view, since, as I mentioned in my comment on the question, keeping the item highlighted when the user doesn't have the mouse down on it looks bad.