If you have ever tried to automate something in the menu bar, you know how difficult it can be. In fact, for many things it has been practically impossible.
Bartender 4 just added a feature that will let you left click, right click, option+left click, or option+right click any menu bar item via keyboard shortcut — and apparently the developer is also adding AppleScript support too.
Use Case: Pause Dropbox
One feature of Dropbox that has always been missing is the ability to pause or resume it via keyboard shortcut or any sort of automation.
For example, I don’t want to have Dropbox running while I am on a Zoom call, so ideally I would like to pause it when I launch Zoom and resume when I quit Zoom.
That’s never been possible, so I’ve done it a different way and told Keyboard Maestro to quit Dropbox when Zoom launches and when Zoom quits, re-launch Dropbox.
The problem is that Dropbox does not like being quit, especially if you have a lot of files in your Dropbox.
Now I can pause/resume Dropbox at will.
First I created a keyboard shortcut (hyper+R because hyper+D was already used)
Note that will option + left-click which will reveal Dropbox’s menu, like so:
now if I type the word ‘pause’ it will choose the ‘Pause Syncing’ option.
So I made a Keyboard Maestro macro that will do that for me:
(Pausing for 1 second is probably longer than it needs to work. YMMV.)
Another macro which types ‘resume’ will unpause Dropbox.
Just one example…
There are, of course, lots of other things that can be done. This is just one example. If you use Bartender, this is definitely worth checking out.
If you don’t use Bartender… well, I’m not sure why anyone wouldn’t use Bartender, but this would be another reason to re-evaluate your life choices. 