What do you put on your macOS menu bar, and what apps can you absolutely not live without?

The macOS menu bar can feel pretty cramped, but tools like Bartender and Ice make it easy to keep things tidy by only showing the icons that are really needed.

Some apps don’t have icons in the menu bar, which can be a hassle because I end up having to open them or check the Dock. I came across this app called Badgeify that makes it super easy. It lets me add icons for any apps I want quick access to, even if they usually don’t show up there, like Slack or Apple Mail. Plus, it disappears when there aren’t any notifications, which is pretty convenient.

I’m curious about what menu bar apps you guys can’t live without, or what apps you think would be better with a menu bar icon.

iStats Menu, Sound Source, Password, Snagit, Spotica & Fantastical. Spotica show’s me now playing tracks plus an album art and player control too. Fantastical will show me the date and upcoming event on the menu bar.

iStat Menus (CPU, MEM, SSD, weather) and Fantastical (week number).

CPU/MEM/SSD because I’m currently running a 13" MacBook Air M1 with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of SSD (the bare minimum Apple Silicon laptop available) and curious when I hit limits. The only limit I hit so far is not being able to drive two external monitors…

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Shoutout to the iHeartRadio Mac App. It was a menu bar app that made music playing on my mac very low maintenance. I delayed getting Apple music by several years because of that app.

Minimalist. Dropbox, Fantastical.

Copy Em’, SpamSieve, Drafts, DEVONthink, Fantastical, Forecast Bar – this is my core group. I have others, hidden by Bartender, but rarely used.

Katie

you can drive two external monitors if you use Display Link software and USB adapter. I have two monitors and laptop display running on my 13" MacBook Pro 8gb 256 gb HD.

One monitor is just a 27" 1920 x 1080
Main monitor is Samsung 34" 2560 x 1080
Then the laptop screen

Great question!

I use Bartender groups and have the following groups:

Backup:

  • Mountain
  • Time Machine
  • Folder Peek, pointing to a folder of SuperDuper! logs
  • MacUpdater (not directly related to backing up, but it makes sense to me to put it here)

Batteries:

Text:

Sound:

I love Bartender’s grouping feature so much!

I use Mountain to prevent my external backup drives from mounting at startup. Instead, I have a launch agent to run a script to mount one of the drives, run Time Machine, and unmount the drive; and SuperDuper! takes care of automating a backup to the other drive. This way I not only reduce wear and tear on the spinny drives I still use, but also keep that low spinny device hum out of my environment most of the time.

Menu bar app I keep visible all the time: ItsyCal

I love little quality apps that fit a specific niche very well.

I think whether an app belongs in the menu bar or the Dock is a bit subjective and can really vary from user to user.

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+1 on ItsyCal I would take this over Fantastical any day.

Also take a look at Dato, similar philosophy to ItsyCal but more polished.

I have bartender keeping things neat and tidy.

Always visible:
N10
Caffeine
Meeting Bar - a must for me
Apple’s battery indicator

Hidden:
Too many things, but nothing that isn’t listed above

Scherm­afbeelding 2024-10-31 om 21.59.28
Hot
App Tamer
iStat Menus
Private Internet Access
TripMode
Caffeinated
AllDente
… and a lot of other utilities under the Bartender dropdown that I don’t have to see.