Great episode … I looked at my menu bar and most of what I have there was on the show. I use Typinator instead of TextExpander because I don’t need the group functionality of TE which seems like what they use to justify a subscription.
One missing app was Transloader which I continue to think of as a hidden gem. On your iPhone/iPad and find a link that you want to download on your Mac? Send it to Transloader and it will be downloaded on your Mac in a few seconds.
The only other one I wanted to mention is MacUpdater which I suspect most of you have heard of. For those who haven’t, it’s a great app for updating your non-Mac App Store apps.
What about you? Any missing gems?
Jettison is essential for me. My laptop mostly lives at my desk, connected to a Thunderbolt dock, but I grab it & go fairly often. I almost always failed to wake it up to eject my external drives – now I don’t worry about it.
A free alternative to Bartender which is pretty good. Ice. GitHub - jordanbaird/Ice: Powerful menu bar manager for macOS
I’ve been using it for a couple of months now after the Bartender brouhaha and to be honest I’m not missing Bartender, although it was more complete in terms of features.
Yeah, I came here for precisely this discussion. I have also been using Ice since then, without any problem and without missing Bartender
Shoutout to the (defunct) iHeart Radio app of all things. Their App was a menu bar app and it made by far the cleanest music app in macOS. Really sad they discontinued.
Good episode.
There’s a useful terminal command in this article that makes menu bar items more compact:
(via @Ojanostra )
From my Mac menubar:
- Supercharge by Sindre Sorhus. To be honest, Sindre has a gazillion of useful apps that reside in the menubar (the other one is Dato)
- The other one is “Reminders Menubar”, a handy tool that allow me to check items during the day without opening Reminders. Not really that useful, but I somehow have a liking to click the menubar instead of switching to another already open app with alt-tab (go figure).
Reminders Menubar is really cool.
Velja by Sindre Sorhus. It’s my default browser, so it gets tons of use.
I like having a simple calendar in the menu bar for referring to day of week of some date. There’s many of these sort of apps in the Mac App Store, but I made my own. It’s very basic… even the name! I’m not planning to publish it to the app store, but I made the repo public. MenuBarCalendar.
Agreed. Reminders MenuBar is where it’s at. It also pairs perfectly with another menu bar gem, Itsycal.
Velja is awesome. Although I’m not sure if it needs a menu bar icon, but it’s good to have for sure.
Also, make sure to checkout Ears app. It’s tells you if you microphone is muted or not, and you can use a hotkey to mute it, system wide. I love it. It can also link sound input-output devices. e.g., use system microphone as input, AirPods as output. Super nice.
The dev gave it to me for free for at that time but it’s cheap. Give me peace of mind.
Oh I totally forgot, BetterTouchTool can let you create custom menu bar items. I created one for window/setup management lol. I rearranges all my windows/apps at the right place on a single click.
Adding to the Sindre-Sorhus-is-great pile, One Thing is so good for focus. And very similar to the time-tracker “intentionality bonus” that David mentions in the episode. I use it to commit to a task by having it right up in the menu bar, with the text set to be as garish as possible so it’s hard to ignore:
And similar on David’s point about the best menu bar apps being visual indicators, I also love Sindre’s Day Progress app for a “pie slice” view of how much time I have left in the workday (I do a better job of explaining it here).
This episode sounds interesting, so I’ll check it out. The timing is great since I recently went on a mission to remove as many items from my menubar (and Dock) as possible. This was on both my personal and employer provided Macbook.
I uninstalled Bartender and went to town. The personal laptop no longer needs bartender, but my employer’s mandatory enterprise apps adds many items to the menu bar so I had to reinstall it there.
I do need to put Jettison back on since I swap Macbooks on my desk several times a day, and the warning from no ejecting the USB drive first is annoying.
Velja does not necessarily need a menu bar icon, but it is useful initially as you add more rules to open certain URLs in specific browsers. Over time, it moves more to the left in a menu bar. Mine is now hidden, but ever so often, I need to add more rules to it.
Unfortunately, ICE is now abandonware, if I’m not mistaken.