Rubrail

Rubrail is a Rust library for building Touch Bar interfaces for Mac OS X.

It creates a persistent icon in the 'Control Strip' region on the right side of the touchbar. This lets you access a Touch Bar menu of your design at any time, regardless of which application is currently active.

Using a pure-Rust API, you can create Touch Bar UIs with the most common items: Buttons, Labels, Sliders, Scrubbers (horizontally scrolling text selections), and recursive menus.

Source for following screencast in examples/example.rs

Run the example

$ cargo test && cargo run --example example_launcher

Warning -- Private APIs

Note that access to the Control Strip is forbidden by Apple's guidelines. Rubrail uses private APIs to create its menus, and thus is not suitable for distribution through the App Store. A 'dummy' implementation is provided for apps that want to provide Touch Bar support, but want the ability to avoid linking against private frameworks when distributing. Build with the --no-default-features Cargo flag to get a dummy implementation that does nothing.

Note -- App bundle required

To communicate with the Touch Bar service, apps using Rubrail must be executed from an app bundle (.app). Running the executable directly will not crash, but the icon will not be registered with the Touch Bar service, so your Touch Bar UI will be unavailable.

The included example comes with a bundling script (examples/example.sh) and a launcher (examples/example_launcher.rs) to move itself into an app bundle and execute.