Mac menubar

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Inspired by Jon Hicks’s year-old “What’s in your menubar?” blog post, I’m listing what’s in mine:

1. Adium X Free, open source chat program, built on libgaim. Supports AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, Google Talk, ICQ, file transfers, Growl notification, encryption. ALso has a modifyable appearance — I’m using the tahci menu icon and iChat Adium dock icon.
2. Quicksilver Quicksilver may be the coolest Mac-only program out there. App laumcher, hard drive indexer, framework for general data handling, brings powerful automation to your fingertips with auto-completion. Freeware. Check out Dan Dickinson’s “A Better OS X in Just 10 Minutes” for a taste, then see these tutorials for more. Quicksilver makes me want to quit my job and work someplace that uses Macs so I can build a decent workflow.
3. Visor Assign a hotkey (I use Command-Esc) and you get a Terminal window that pops down from your menubar like in Quake. I installed it just ’cause it looks cool, but it turns out to be pretty handy for quick shell access. Freeware.
4. Desktop Manager Lets you have a bunch of virtual screens and switch among them with keyboard shortcuts. Linux users are all hot for this kind of thing. There are a few programs like this for the Mac, but this one is free, and seems to work pretty well. (Virtue Desktops is another, also free.) Somehow I don’t wind up using it; I might if I did more work stuff with my Mac.
5. Gee! Notifier for gMail. Actually can be made to work with any Atom feed. I’ve got six messages waiting for me, and they’re all spam!
6. Textpander This is the old, free version of TextExpander ($30), which lets you define custom abbreviations that automatically get expanded out as you type. Among other things, I’ve got mine set up to turn “teh” into “the”.
7. High Priority Menu extra that lets you display and manage your iCal ToDo list from the menubar, without even having iCal open. $6.
8. Script Menu From Apple. Comes with MacOS X.
9. MenuMeters System monitoring tool. I’ve got mine set up to display memory usage and processor activity. Freeware.
10. Standard MacOS X wifi signal display. Our wifi base station is about eight feet below my butt, so I usually have four bars of signal strength.
11. Standard MacOS X keyboard and character menu. Up through OSX 10.3 Canadians had to suffer through either having a US flag up there or using the French Canadian settings (and getting guillemets instead of quotation marks), but as of 10.4 there’s a Canadian flag for English-speaking Canucks as well, so you can take your laptop with you to Europe without getting harassed as an imperialist warmonger.
12. Standard MacOS X battery charge display.
13. Standard MacOS X date & time display.
14. Standard MacOS X Spotlight icon.

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