Michael Fitzhugh June 12, 2011 at 1:10 am

One thing I found remarkable in trying to come up with menu bar items to suggest is just how thoroughly most have been replaced in my computing life by browser extensions. Password managers, web clippers, and download tools have all migrated from my menubar to my browser toolbar during the past few years. Just a couple remain: I still rely heavily on things like Mailplane’s toolbar item to preview my inbox and switch between multiple Gmail accounts. I’m also glad you took time to mention Better Touch Tool in the podcast. It’s indispensable for custom gesture support and window resizing too. TextExpander is superb, as most people already know. But beyond those, I’m finding fewer and fewer needs for menubar items. Strange, but true.
Michael Fitzhugh June 12, 2011 at 1:17 am

Bah! I did forget one gem: Spirited Away, . It “checks each running application’s activity, and if an application isn’t active for a certain fixed time, Spirited Away hides the application automatically.” I haven’t used it for a while, but when you have a heap of apps running and just need to maintain some sanity, it can be really nice.
Tim Lahey June 12, 2011 at 2:05 am

A couple of apps I regularly use, Hyperspaces and Optimal Layout. The former adds some nice features to Spaces and the latter provides application and window switching as well as controlling window placement and sizing. Pangea also makes a handy launcher called TabMeister where you can create tabs where you can place apps or documents in the tabs for quick access. A Dock based app I use is Dropzone which has some predefined actions (like file upload) you can do by drag and drop. I use it to upload files to specific destinations without having to worry about starting Transmit.

That Secrets command to add the recent applications is discussed in a good Macworld article on the Dock.

Some other apps of interest, F.lux is useful in that it changes the colour temperature of the screen based upon the time of day. Note that you should disable it if you’re doing work where the colour displayed on the screen is important. It has an option to disable it temporarily.

Instead of Fantastical, I use QuickCal which is much cheaper, but has the same natural language interface to add events, it just isn’t as pretty and doesn’t show the complete calendar, just the next few days. One nice thing is that it hooks directly into Google Calendar which is useful with BusyCal.

I quite like QuickCursor which allows you to take the text from any text area and edit it in an editor of your choice.

Lastly, I love Keyboard Maestro. I have several custom macros which I use regularly. I especially like the Num Pad macro that I customized. So, if you need to use a number pad on a laptop (or the wireless keyboard) just hit a keystroke and a portion of the keyboard will work as a number pad.
Steve C. June 12, 2011 at 10:06 am

While I really like CNet news, when they retired VersionTracker and substituted it with CNet Tech Tracker, I just couldn’t believe how bad it was relative to VersionTracker, especially the number of pings, and difficulty finding the list of changes, etc.

I’ve since switched over to MacUpdate ($25/yr) which works great, is much faster than the VersionTracker app. Plus it allows you do download and install updates from within the MacUpdate Desktop application, which is very nice. It also checks widgets, preference panes, etc. too which is nice.
Tim Lahey June 12, 2011 at 5:27 pm

Oh, instead of Mouseposé, there’s also OmniDazzle from Omni Group. It doesn’t have all the features, but it’s free. It has a sketching mouse cursor mode that I use for teaching to highlight things all the time.
John H. Armwood June 12, 2011 at 9:38 pm

Overflow is a very nice Dock extension utility that allows you to put Dock icons in a folder system that is both attractive and easy to use. I also use LaunchBar but I rarely use my MaBook at a desk so I find it easier to just click on icons in Overview while working on the couch

http://stuntsoftware.com/overflow/

. In addition I am a number of years older than Katie and David and with so many programs on my Mac I forget about them so I like to view the icons.
Olga June 12, 2011 at 9:43 pm

I highly recommend OmniDazzle (by the Omni Group)
http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnidazzle/

It’s a free utility for your cursor, much like Mousepose’.
Trevor June 12, 2011 at 9:44 pm

One thing about Fastistical —

I was listening to a recent episode of the MacCast with Adam Christiansen, and he was interviewing the maker(s) of Fantastical, and one of the subjects of conversation was that they actually had to build their CalDav support up from scratch in order for them to be able to sync with google calendar etc without opening iCal – just fyi

love the show
Olga June 12, 2011 at 10:35 pm

A widget I use all the time is Screenshot Plus
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/business/screenshotplus_stevenchaitoff.html

Fantastic utility
Greg June 12, 2011 at 11:47 pm

I like Today by Second Gear. It sits in the corner of my desktop, and shows me the events and tasks from iCal.
I like it because it stays on my desktop all the time – no need to pull it down from a menu, or anything like that. A quick glance, and I can see what I need to do.
Lamike June 13, 2011 at 1:42 pm

Really nice job guys. Going to cost me some money for needed new apps. Regarding the elimination of Flash on your Mac and setting up the Chrome gambit, I think the post David was trying to remember was not from JB. Dan McAllister does his usual excellent job of walking you through the process over at ScreenCastsOnLine in his MiniMontage 21 (SCO0281). Highly recommend that everyone view this ScreenCast as my bet is no future Macs will have Flash installed.
Michael F June 13, 2011 at 6:45 pm

Interesting that both of you mentioned that despite using widescreen displays, you weren’t able to adjust to having the Dock on the left and have reverted to placing it on the bottom. Have you tried placing it on the right? It seems weird at first, but I found that it was far less prone to get in the way when on the right edge of the screen — maybe because I’m much more likely to place a window flush-left on my screen than flush-right.

If I’m using auto-hide for the dock, I also find that I don’t tend to accidentally trigger the Dock via scrollbar clicks, while I frequently do with text selections and a left-side Dock.

Finally, it’s subliminally comforting that with a right-side Dock, the Trash winds up at the bottom right of the screen – the One True Location for us old-timey System 6/7 veterans, dagnabbit!
1. Angelique September 20, 2011 at 10:20 am
  
  Totally agree! Dock on right is very helpful. I use two screens always with my larger/extended screen in front, Mac to the right & external keyboard. I work from my extended screen and pull everything from my laptop. Result: Lots of real estate, nothing in the way = focus….and everything I need within a few inches away.
  
  Because I work with a million apps & web pages open at once (just the nature of my work) it helps tremendously!
Chris (Amateur Traveler) June 13, 2011 at 8:23 pm

Also in my menubar are JumpCut and TypeItForMe. I commute between San Jose and Boston so in my dashboard are always at least two clocks and two weather widgets.
Kevin Taylor June 13, 2011 at 8:41 pm

For pasting unformatted text from the clipboard, I use the “Copy and Paste as Plain Text” action command from within Launchbar. It works just great after having copied something to the clipboard. I use it a whole heck of a lot, actually!

It’s much easier than hitting a button, or digging out the command, or learning each application’s peculiar key command for pasting unformatted text.
Al June 13, 2011 at 9:30 pm

I have Droplr in my menubar and I love it. It does a myriad of things including: auto posting code into pastebin, putting an image up online, or shortening a link. Just drag and drop and it automagically puts the link on you clipboard. I find it invaluable for sharing things, plus it’s free!
Simon Andersen June 14, 2011 at 7:47 am

I was disappointed that you didn’t address menu bar item overflow. You invariably get to a point where you have so many menu bar items on the right that they get hidden by the overlap of the regular menu items on the left. Maybe there’s no solution to this other than not having so many menu bar items or using a 27 inch iMac. But I’d sure like to see menu bar items relegated to something like the System 7 Control Strip.
1. Simon Andersen December 11, 2012 at 8:21 am
  
  The tools I coveted have since been introduced. I personally use Bartender now to manage my menu bar items and it works well and is currently well supported.
  
  Take a look at Bartender at MacUpdate or one of the comparative products listed there
Robert Nixon June 14, 2011 at 12:06 pm

I do three things that you didn’t mention…

#1 I sometimes pull a widget out of the dashboard by clicking and holding the widget while closing the dashboard. This lets you “float” a widget on your desktop and can be very useful for a reference widget or something you are adding or removing info from.

#2 I put my dock on the right were it is easy to access via dropping files on apps and things from the desktop. With a big screen it is nice to have the dock and the files close together for being able to drop on apps and things.

#3 Maybe this one doesn’t count for this discussion but I’ll mention it anyway. Putting the file name and info on the right side of the icon in the desktop. This allows you to fit more stuff in a more compact area of your desktop.
Jim Sewell June 14, 2011 at 4:12 pm

Simon is right about overflow. I have several menubar items and when I use Razor SQL which has 14 menu items it becomes impossible to function well.

One “somewhat” menubar item I use a lot is Skitch although I trigger all the captures by keypress and only use the menubar item to open it up.

One thing David mentioned was Transmit which has a menubar icon. I use that a lot to mount remote drives on our different servers at work – click, click and it’s open in finder.

I never liked the Dashboard too much though and I don’t use it.

As gaudy as it is, I use a moderate magnify just so I can see all those little badges on my programs. Unread meails, status of TextExpander to see if Chrome has blocked it again, etc.

I keep my dock on the left and it has worked out pretty well for me.

The best tool I have, IMO is Alfred which is similar to LaunchBar. It frees up a lot of real estate – no need for a calculator on the Dashboard, for instance.

Good show guys,
Cheers
Jim Sewell / @Deverill
Tom Wurster June 14, 2011 at 5:28 pm

I really like the widget TunesTEXT for putting lyrics into new song purchases. It saves a lot of time when the songs come up. You can find it at:

http://www.cyanworks.net/dboardTunesTEXT.html

Here is my workflow for lyrics at:

http://tomwurster.com/2011/02/05/lyrics-in-itunes/
Simon Andersen June 15, 2011 at 3:56 am

If you really want to gunk up your menubar then take a look at Butler from ManyTricks

http://manytricks.com/butler/

Unfortunately it shares a lot of functionality with LaunchBar so I don’t really find it useful myself but the graphical pulldown menus reminds me nostalgically of the Apple menu in Classic Mac OS.
Brian June 15, 2011 at 5:42 am

Good episode and I used many of the menu bar apps. two I would like to ad dare Cloud app and Droplr. Both are great to drag and drop easily and get a short URL out to someone.
George June 15, 2011 at 8:03 am

Great show! You hit almost all my menubar items accept this one – Proxi from Griffin which seems to be very obscure or abandoned software but I am running it flawlessly on my MacBook and iMac – Snow Leopard 10.6.7 on both. You can download it here: http://mac.softpedia.com/progDownload/Proxi-Download-19703.html
Portaferry June 16, 2011 at 7:13 am

CNET TECH Tracker – well I tried it & did not like it. I found, like others this app was confusing to uninstall!!! You must FIRST go to the CNET web page & remove your computer from the”CNET System” & then manually remove the CNET Tech Tracker components from your computer (MAC). There is no remove/uninstall programme & this has & will cause continuing problems, ..
Ilkka Viinikanoja June 16, 2011 at 10:32 am

One of my most used menubar items (which I actually don’t use that much via the menubar but via keyboard shortcuts instead) is SwitchResX. What I use it for is enabling & disabling the external display programmatically. My setup is so that at home my MacBook mostly sits on a stand connected to an external 24″ display, and my Xbox 360 hooks to the same display. So when I want to relax a bit and play, I just resize my browser window to fit into the MacBook display (should automate this, though) and hit the keyboard combination that disables the external display so the main display gets assigned to the MacBook screen and I can continue using the computer to its full extent (as opposed to toying around on a window specifically dragged to the MacBook display) while waiting for the game to load or friends to appear online.

A good thing is that unlike a few years ago, SwitchResX does not require APE anymore. It did back in the day I originally got the software for my PPC Mac Mini so that my then-new display would work properly via DVI.
Jens Hjerrild Poder June 17, 2011 at 5:02 am

Hi guys. Thanks for another great show.

A menu bar favourite of mine is: Pomodoro app!

It’s a timer, that lets you set a goal, and then ticks away until the time is up. You know… for us with attension span problems It’s in the app store, but also open source (if you want to build it yourself to save a couple of bucks).

Oh… and thanks for reminding me of dashboard. This feauture is complete mystery to me. Haven’t used it since the first fourteen days after switching to mac. Will try and launch it again someday

Jens Poder
Mike June 19, 2011 at 10:51 am

Hey guys, great show.

Several weeks ago I decided to experiment with my menubar. Instead of adding more icons to my menubar, I got rid of all of them. The only thing I have left is the day/date/time. No more iChat, Spotlight, Bluetooth, or Dropbox icons. I even got rid of the Volume and Wireless icons.

My reason? All of those icons are clutter. The only thing I truly use the menu bar for is checking the time, and by “truly” I mean refer to more than twice a day. If I need to connect to a different wireless network or tether to my iPhone, I jump to the Network Prefs pane from Launchbar. If I need to change the volume, I’ve got 3 hardware buttons for that. If I’m going to connect my Bluetooth headphones I pop open the Bluetooth Prefs pane from Launchbar as well. Spotlight is a few keystrokes away via Launchbar.

Launchbar is the vital ingredient in all of this, which I thank you guys for introducing me to.

I’ve been quite happy with my clutter-free menubar. I glance to the upper right less often, so I have more attention to spare now on more important things, like listening to your show.

Thanks for the great work. Looking forward to the next episode.

Mike
Robert Fauver June 20, 2011 at 9:39 am

Minuteur! Minuteur! Minuteur!
I absolutely love this app and have used it for quite some time. It’s an egg timer application with a ton of flexibility. It’s Menubar integration has been indispensable for keeping track of my time while executing tasks.
Check it out at http://www.phg-home.com/index_mac.html
Page is written in French
James Smith June 20, 2011 at 5:32 pm

Just wanted to let you know that there’s a great site for submitting and viewing other peoples Menu Bars. It’s called Mac Menu Bars and can be found at http://macmenubars.com/. Great site for seeing what other people use.

One Menu Bar Icon that I might suggest is Nocturn (http://www.blacktree.com). It’s from the developer of Quicksilver and is a great application for using your Mac late at night. The main feature allows you to switch you Mac into night mode which inverts the colours but also allows you to customise how it does it.

Cheers,

Can’t wait until the next podcast
Max Rydahl Andresen June 21, 2011 at 6:56 am

Great episode but the one piece of information I was wanting for was left out.

How do you rearrange the menubar when the app does not support the Cmd+Click to move them ?

Thanks,
Jon June 21, 2011 at 8:34 pm

You can also adjust the activity monitor dock icon to monitor a single system process. The dock icon becomes a graph for RAM, CPU, etc use. Activity monitor needs to be running, but this could be helpful for an istat menus user who needs to free up menubar space. (It’s in a pull down menu).
BJ June 24, 2011 at 2:04 pm

I know I’m a little behind but here’s my Menubar list:
1. Dropin: Dropbox utility that gives you better notifications, droplets
2. SMCFanControl: lets you control the speed of your fans (nice for my MBP)
3. Bluebird: Twitter follower/favorite notifications
4. CalendarBar: lists upcoming events
5. Cloud App: image hosting, link shortening, etc.
6. gfxCardStatus: lets you choose which graphics controller to use on MBPs, nice for when I’m running on battery power
7. Keyboard Maestro: make your keyboard do anything you want
8. Dropbox
9. BetterTouchTool: absolutely essential to my Mac. Makes the trackpad SO powerful.
John June 24, 2011 at 8:04 pm

I like MacUpdate.com and don’t like CNET’s Versiontracker.
Jeff July 2, 2011 at 9:26 pm

Does DashQuit just show “…” for RAM use for anyone else?
Beth October 17, 2011 at 3:43 pm

Here’s a way to lock/unlock the Dock for folks who may be frightened by the effect of dragging an icon off the Dock:
http://lifehacker.com/tips/forum?comment=39339674

I know this is months old now, but maybe someone else will still find it useful.

Comments are closed.