I don’t think so, but it’s on the roadmap for Ice.
Perhaps now that there’s probably a major influx of users to all other apps, they’ll be quicker to implement this feature – unless, of course, Apple sherlocks all of them on Monday.
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I think providing a solid app for 12 years has earned Ben the benefit of the doubt.
Any time I purchase an app from a solo developer, or a small team, I accept that it may not exist tomorrow.
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Doubly true given how price-sensitive the software market is.
If he had the opportunity to sell his business at an attractive price who can blame him?
He delivered to me/us everything he promised - there was never a commitment to support the product forever.
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True, but the new owners not only haven’t earned the benefit of the doubt, their behavior has sowed considerable and very understandable doubt and suspicion. They burned through 12 years of goodwill in two months. Ben’s letter is unlikely to change that.
Once I verified that Applause had silently added the Amplitude frameworks, I uninstalled. That’s a nope for me.
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The new owners have nothing to do with Ben’s reputation, and wish him well going forward. Bartender is starting fresh with zero points on the board.
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Like you, I decided I didn’t need Bartender or any similar app. I’ve removed many icons but I can’t seem to remove the Alfred icon. Is there some trick to this? Thanks.
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In Afred Settings > Appearance there is a button labeled “Options” at the lower left. Click it, and in the resulting popup there is a checkbox, “Hide menu bar icon”. Check that and you should be good.
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It took me a little while to find it as well:
Alfred Preferences > Appearance > Little options button at the bottom of the list of themes > Hide menu icon
HTH
Thanks to both of you! I had missed the little options button.
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I didn’t say they did—I agreed with you that his 12-year track record had earned him the benefit of the doubt—though he really should have communicated to his users that he was selling the app in the first place.
I also wish him well. I certainly enjoyed and got my money’s worth out of Bartender over the time I used it.
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Can you clarify a bit what Amplitude is used for? What are the good and the bad reasons that it might be installed?
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this is not even the issue… nobody cares that he got overwhelmed and needed to sell the app. It was the lack of transparency and overall shadiness of the process. Allowing a new party to update the app while we were under the impression that he was the one pushing the update is a huge breach of trust. Some of you may be a little too forgiving. That act alone burned all benefit of doubt imo
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It tracks, and depending on the settings and specific frameworks used, it goes beyond tracking the kinds of things a Web browser tracks. And Bartender has system privileges in order to function. It was the only app using Amplitude, and Amplitude was constantly calling home.
Something like, say, knowing what apps I use, isn’t necessarily a privacy issue *it’s useful for marketing and has resale value), but it’s my data. Not theirs, and they didn’t ask.
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Would the year to year purchase be considered a subscription? I have done that for Bartender the last two years, but tend to avoid “lifetime” because I don’t know which will come first, them or mine 
If the new macOS breaks Bartender, which it probably will, as it has done quite reliably with the past two macOS versions, we will see if the new ‘developers’ are up to the task of updating the app to make it work again.
Also, I wish Apple would finally on Monday clean up the mess they made themselves by introducing the notch on laptops without providing any software support for menu bar items to work around that thing and introduce a native system for managing menu bar items. They have sort of done the first step already by moving their own menu bar items to the Control Centre. Windows has had this solved for… two decades now?
This, and the Rectangle/Magnet thing need to be baked into the OS.
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Agreed. Those are both glaring gaps in basic DE functionality that should be built into macOS.
(If the first one happens on Monday, Ben sold Bartender at the perfect time. 
)
I like the idea of giving the new owners a week. If they don’t own up then I move on.
Maybe the next Sparky lab experiment - test all the Bartender replacements including BTT.
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So what’s the last ‘safe’ version ?
The last ‘safe’ one is 5.0.49 from here (as already linked somewhere above):
https://www.macbartender.com/Bartender5/release_notes/
Just in case the new ‘developers’/owners resign these old versions with the new certificate, add tracking and telemetry to them, or engage in any such shenanigans, you can check the checksum of the app after installing it by using the following command from Terminal:
shasum -a 256 '/Applications/Bartender 5.app/Contents/MacOS/Bartender 5'
SHA checksum should be:
0e8d629edcdbf26c190c978a4e98e47712596e664605d2b9a2c0e5f128bb7120
You can also install What’s Your Sign:
… and then use it to check the app’s developer certificate/signature (it should say ‘Surtees Studios’).
Also:
- Make sure to disable automatic updates in Bartender.
- Keep the download somewhere safe in case it gets pulled from the archive.
- Use LuLu (download it from Objective See, too – it’s free) or Little Snitch (if you have it) to prevent Bartender from making any connections – just in case.
- Expect things to break with the new release of macOS this autumn and look for an alternative.
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