Putting the JMenuBar on the Mac menu bar

Now that you know your Java/Swing application is running on the Mac, the next step is to get the menu bar to look like a Mac application. If you do nothing at all your Swing application JMenuBar is going to be on your application's JFrame, as shown Figure 4.1:

Figure 4.1: By default, the JMenuBar is shown on the JFrame.

To get the menu bar off the JFrame and onto the Mac menubar, all you need to do is set the system property apple.laf.useScreenMenuBar to true, like this:

System.setProperty("apple.laf.useScreenMenuBar", "true");

Figure 4.2 show that after this one line of code the JMenuBar is now shown on the Mac menu bar for your application:

Figure 4.2: The JMenuBar is now moved to the Mac menu bar.

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