Unresponsive UI Elements after closing NSWindow

Question

Last week I spent a good amount of time fiddling around with the following problem. I solved it but since I couldn't find an answer here and I want to share my solution for anybody who runs into this.

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Problem: My application runs in the background (menubar) and its main NSWindow contains all the preferences of my application. You close the NSWindow by clicking the close button in the top-left. After closing the NSWindow and reopening it, all the NSControls were not visually responding. The actions worked accordingly, but they where not updating.

I tried the following:

• Unchecking "Release on close" in IB for NSWindow
• Reloading NSWindow from NIB
• Strong references for all NSControls
• Calling "Become first responder" on NSControls
• Reloading all the parenting NSViews
• Implementing all the delegates hooking up each NSControl (Worked for NSControl, but was way too much work to use it for each and every one)
• Disabling and then reenabling the NSControls

I'll post my solution below for the records.

Answer 1

My solution to this problem was to subclass NSWindow and overwrite the following methods:

- (void)performClose:(id)sender{
    [self orderOut:nil];
}

- (void)close{
    [self orderOut:nil];
}

Now the NSWindow is hidden / ordered out and you just have to order it back in when displaying it.