Aerial menubar applet mispositioned when icon is hidden

[inb4ohnoes]

I have the aerial menubar icon hidden with bartender, and whenever I open it via the .app, the menubar applet pops up in the top left hand corner and looks a bit funky. Sometimes it's just completely off the screen.

I think ideally in this situation, the menubar applet would open in the middle of the primary screen and without the carat that usually points to the menubar app.

Also in this situation, i can't click outside the applet window to dismiss it, which I feel is expected standard behavior for menubar applets.

Ignore the red rectangle, just redacting some widgets 😅

[glouel]

Yeah, opening via the app is going to conflict with bartender, there's not much I can do about that as I don't control "where" I pop, I just ask macOS to show it up and it does, bartender is the one messing with the position here in practice, my launch from app is not going to help here.

Not dismissing, again not clear, my guess is again bartender makes it weird here. Can you try pressing Escape, see if that does it? It should dismiss. OR click the desktop, click back the popover again, then press Escape or press outside again, see if any of these scenarios work.

I'm planning a pure "dock mode" instead of the menu bar mode for 4.1 at some point, so you get a single window when you use it from the dock instead, if you really don't want the icon in the menu bar that would be the way to go. In the meantime either use as is or don't hide until 4.1. That's a few weeks off but i think that's the real solution for what you want.

[inb4ohnoes]

So I've just figured out I can repro the "applet not dismissing when clicking outside applet window" problem by launching the applet from the app, clicking the "Wallpaper" dropdown, then clicking outside the applet window. If I then click on the applet window and hit escape, it dismisses. After that, I can launch the applet and click outside the applet window to dismiss it as normal. If I open the Wallpaper dropdown, the same issue occurs.

Pure dock mode would be nice! I actually don't have aerial in the dock either. I only open the app or applet when I need to adjust settings. To be honest I found the differentiation between the app and applet to be a bit confusing. I had difficulty figuring out why the wallpaper was only appearing on my main screen before I found the "Wallpaper" checkmark settings in the applet UI...

[glouel]

Right now I hide it in the dock on purpose, but in order to keep it running in the background, I need to have it either in the menu bar or the dock. So it's gonna be an either/or.

The "relaunch the app" to make it pop up again (what you call applet is just the same app, I'm just showing the menu of the app) doesn't relaunch it, it's still running, and I tell macOS to open my menu, basically. Hope that makes more sense as to how it works.

I'll keep this open until the dock mode is there.

As for the focus problem, use that workaround for now of clicking inside, it's likely because the icon is hidden and the menu doesn't get the focus. By clicking on it you are putting it in focus is my guess, which is why you can then dismiss it.