Bartender: A Menu Bar Cop

Do you suffer from menu bar overload? You know, when you've installed so many things on your Mac that keep a menu bar icon active that you've run out of space up there, or your menu bar is so "busy" you have trouble finding what you're looking for. Well, for 15 bucks you can reign in the clutter with Bartender.

First, I'd like to bitch a little...

Note to developers: When you write an app intended to run constantly, give users the choice to turn off your menu bar icon! I'm not going to call out anyone here, but knuckleheads who do this know who they are.

OK, on to business. There's a couple of reasons you may have limited space on your menu bar. If you use a Mac with a lower-resolution screen like a 13" MacBook Pro (1280 X 800), you may simply not have enough pixels to get a whole lot up there. Or, if you're like me, you run apps to keep track of what's happening on your Mac like iStat Menus or MenuMeters. Either of these can quickly fill up a menu bar if you elect to keep lots of meters displaying. No matter what the reason, an over-crowded menu bar can be confusing and unsightly. If you do have lots of screen like a 27" iMac, it's easy to fill the menu bar over time with so much stuff you get into a "forest for the trees" situation, making finding a particular menu bar item amongst the clutter a real chore.

Bartender creates a second, auto-hiding, drop-down menu bar (the Bartender Bar) for holding those menu bar icons you may only need occasionally but don't want to turn off completely. My Bartender bar holds Unclutter, TextExpander and all my various (and numerous) cloud storage items like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net, Carbonite, etc. In all, I keep nine items there, reducing the space used on my main menu bar by a third.

If you're worried that Bartender might "cubbyhole" items and prevent you from seeing important notifications, never fear. For any third-party app, Bartender will put its icon back on the menu bar whenever the icon needs to notify you about something. You can set how long it stays there from 5 seconds to 10 minutes and just about anywhere in between. In any case, the Bartender bar is only a click or hotkey away. For apps written by the afore-mentioned knuckleheads, Bartender lets you hide their menu bar icons altogether if you wish.  System icons get pretty much the same treatment save the ability to move them back to the menu bar automatically.

So, if you're running out of room, getting cluttered or just like a minimalist look for your menu bar, $15 is what it will cost for Bartender to make things right. If you're not sure, you can download it at macbartender.com and try it for a month for free. That's what I did. When the clock ran out on my iMac I turned Bartender off for a couple of days. I really missed it. After trying to manually turn menu bar icons off and turning some apps off in an attempt to clean up my menu bar, I surrendered and ponied up. Fifteen bucks may not be the deal of the century, but for me it was money well-spent for an app that does one thing and does it very well.