Mac menubar, 2011

[avram]

I haven’t done this in a while:

1. Tweetie, a Twitter client for Macs. I think there’s also an iOS version. The free version is supposedly ad-supported, but I haven’t paid and I’ve yet to see an ad.
2. Visor still does the same stuff it did back in 2006 — hotkey-activated Terminal window that pops down from your menubar — but it’s got a new developer. Still free, too.
3. F.lux is free software (for Mac, Windows, Linux) that shifts the color temperature of your monitor at night, to make it easier for you to get to sleep after a long evening spent staring into it.
4. Quicksilver, which still does all the cool stuff it did back in that 2006 entry. I tried out the 30-day free trial of LaunchBar, and found it slightly more capable, but not enough so to justify spending money on it.
5. DateLine displays a linear calendar on your screen (I’ve got it running across the bottom of mine), and has a menu for adding new events to iCal. It’s free, or you can spend less than $5 to register and get a few extra features.
6. TextExpander is the commercial version of Textpander, the abbreviation-expanding program. I shelled out for it at some point in the last five years; maybe the old version wouldn’t work with Leopard?
7. Notify is my current email notification program. Not only does it tell me if I’ve got unread mail in my gMail inbox, it also lets me read the mail, delete it, or mark it as read, all from the menu, saving me from having to load gMail into my browser more than half the time.
8. WeatherDock shows me the weather in my menubar. Also in my Dock, which I hardly ever look at.
9. Caffeine keeps my Mac from going to sleep. Click the icon and it fills with coffee, and the computer stays awake. Click it again, and it goes back to normal.
10. Little Snitch checks for programs attempting to establish outgoing Internet connections, and lets me establish rules for allowing or disallowing them. I currently have it switched off.
11. Standard MacOS X Bluetooth control.
12. Standard MacOS X WiFi network strength indicator.
13. Standard MacOS X battery/power indicator.
14. Standard MacOS X keyboard and character menu.
15. Standard MacOS X date & time display.
16. Standard MacOS X Spotlight icon.

Comments

[jl8e]

I usually find myself trying to remove icons from the menubar. (Just purged vmware and mobileme.)

[jl8e]

I find command-tab enough for switching to terminal or emacs when I need them, but I find my self not needing to that often anymore

I still run them on login, though. It'd feel wrong not to n

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

I have many fewer than you do, but at work I have the keychain access status icon in the menu bar (which I use to quickly get to Ticket Viewer.

I also use MenuMeters both at home and work, so I can see when I'm pegging the CPU and/or memory.

[mcroft.livejournal.com]

I looked at Visor, and ran screaming when I saw that the first thing it does is require SIMBL.

Every system update disaster story I've read in recent history has come down to "and it was the input manager which caused the update to erase the hard drive!".