Do you have a Mac and have more than a few menu bar items? I feel your pain. I have a bunch of productivity apps (Fantastical, Cloud app, Updaters, etc.) that clutter the top of my menu bar. Don’t believe me, check it out below.
OK, I did add a few more just to be dramatic, but most of them up there are there almost all the time. I’d like to add more (notice there is no time?) but I just don’t have the room. Also, when I open virtually any other program, it has to cover up a bit of menubar times with their own menus. It can be a little frustrating like having a messy desk.
Time for a change. Time to tidy things up! Time for a Bartender!!! Huh? What? No, I’m talking about hitting up the local happy hour, I’m talking about the app Bartender from Surtees Studios.
Bartender will help manage and tame that out of control menu bar. Check out my after image below.
Don’t worry, everything is still there-heck I even added the time back into the menu bar, but I still have access to everything you see in the before image. If you haven’t guessed it yet, Bartender will hide/manage those apps running on the menubar. Want to learn more? Who doesn’t?! Click on past the break to see what Bartender can do for you.
So when I click on the butler icon here is what happens. Awesome!
A little menu bar appears with all of my unruly menubar items. It will stay open until I click into a program then it will disappear. Don’t worry though you have some nice preference settings so you can control how Bartender behaves.
Also, hiding menubar items is a mouse click away. Open up the preferences and you will see a list of menubar items on the left hand side (notice how it separate out Apple’s from third party apps?). Select the item in question and then you can select if you want it to be hidden completely, show in Bartender or leave it visible. Super simple.
Bartender does not just stop there. When I clicked to see my apps I didn’t particularly like the way they were organized. Don’t worry the good people at Surtees Studio have thought of that too. Simply hold down your command key (z) and you can drag them around to whatever order suits your style.
To help you use Bartender even faster you can add shortcut keys to perform certain common actions.
You can even change the icon in the menubar as well.
Bartender isn’t going to make you a better educator/student but if you’re like me having a disorganized desk, computer desktop kind of drives me crazy, so getting this menubar in order helps me cut down the clutter and keep my focus on work. That I like.
Sounds great right? So what’s the catch? Well, it is a little pricey for such a simple app. It costs $15. You can try it out for 4 weeks before you decide to buy or not. As for me I got lucky. I purchased a software bundle from MacHeist and this happened to be included :).
If you’re on the fence, go ahead and download the trial and give it a test drive before you shell out your hard earned cash.
You can find Bartender here for $15 or a 4 week trial version. As always let us at IT Babble know what you think of Bartender in the comments below.
Technology in the Classroom 