Top menu bar tools for your Mac

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Top menu bar tools for your Mac

by Victor Agreda, Jr. Aug 5th 2005

There are numerous menu bar additions and hacks for the Mac. Not as many as for the Windows tray of course, but that's to be expected. I haven't seen them all, and this is not necessarily an exhaustive list (there are lots installed via hardware like Kensington's mouse tools), but there are some very handy toys out there for the Mac menu bar. In fact, I remember when Apple did away with the beloved control strip and everyone had a hissy fit. Well, you can get a lot of those functions back with some of these apps. Except those Iomega tools—but when's the last time you used a Zip or Jaz disk? Read on for my slightly large list of apps for your menu bar...

Dan Frakes did a great write-up of some menu bar stuff way back in 2004 for Macworld. I'll mention some of those here, plus a few found over at the Unofficial Apple Weblog, and a couple I found all by my little self.

Burnout menu is a to-do list on steroids and was covered by TUAW. Quite nice for less than six bucks.
BluePhoneMenu is caller ID for those of you with your kickin' Bluetooth phones (lucky dogs). It automatically checks your address book, so it's very easy to conifigure. You can also SMS with it. TUAW covered it last year.
MenuMeters are a favorite of C.K., as they show a plethora of full-color data in a tiny space. Network stats, cpu, memory, etc. are available, and the thing is released under the GNU GPL. Sweet.
Another one of TUAW's favorite apps Growl includes the GrowliTunes plugin for the menu too. It gives you control over iTunes of course.

Frakes' article mentions many Apple menu items (did you know you can access your VPN from the menu bar?), and some of these:

SoundSource, an audio input/output selector sort of like SoundFlower.
Ejector gives you access to ejecting disks (duh).
If you listen to iTunes all day, iTunesRating lets you rate the current song.
Get sick of launching System Prefs all day? Shortcut it with MenuPrefs.
The clever iDiskMenu mounts and unmounts iDisk, WebDav or ftp volumes.
Like many bloggers I need a better clipboard, so enter iPaste, with its own menu item too.
Dan makes mention of a couple of You Control tools. You Control is a powerful utility that extends the functionality of the OS similar to QuickSilver. It does a lot, so be prepared for a learning curve but some great tools that go way beyond the menu bar...

Some of my own finds:

A while back I mentioned PiquantMenu, another app launcher and file browser that detaches from the menu when needed.
MenuStrip will make fans of the Classic OS Control Strip happy. It does that, plus it'll sit up in the menu bar itself. It's several tools in one, including a very handy web search field in your menu.
XMenu is yet another app launcher (bottom of the page). But it's from DEVONThink, so it's got that going for it, which is good.
MenuCalendarClock is one of the best of its breed I've seen. Isn't the name self-descriptive? It's also available for Windows for some reason...
One of my favorite apps Pod2Go has a menu bar shortcut for syncing all my stuff to my iPod.

While doing my research for all this I find the motherlode of menu items over at the Jeweled Platypus.

Everything from Gmail checkers to RSS readers. That figures. And if you still aren't satisfied, why not make your own menu app?

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

nate said 5:51PM on 8-05-2005

I didn't see Pinki mentioned anywhere. It is a pretty handy menu bar item for quickly creating thumbnail icons for a bunch of different graphic formats. Unfortunately it doesn't work on Illustrator documents, but just about everything else works. download here:http://www.mkd.cc/pinki/

echidnae said 8:54PM on 8-05-2005

Another menu bar tool that I find handy is URLwell, which I use to store URLs that I don't feel like bookmarking or have pile up on my desktop. Good for those sites where you say "oh, I'll read this later..."

http://www.enigmarelle.com/urlwell.py

Victor Agreda, Jr. said 9:08PM on 8-05-2005

See, I *told* you it wasn't comprehensive! These are great... keep 'em coming. Now we just need someone with a 30" Cinema display to install all of them and put it on Flickr...

Martin said 12:26AM on 8-06-2005

There's a large list over here: http://menu.jeweledplatypus.org/ which I mentioned on my site about a week ago: http://www.tipmonkies.com/2005/08/01/super-osx-menubar-items

Kesey said 1:15AM on 8-06-2005

PTHPasteboard is my must-have menu bar icon:

http://www.pth.com/PTHPasteboard/

macmaxbh said 7:46AM on 8-06-2005

Well, I also have SmartReporter, which checks the S.M.A.R.T status of my drive every hour and will warn me if my drive is about to fail, Synergy (although the site is down presently), the best iTunes controller, which includes Growl support and I'm pretty sure can rate-on-the-fly, along with quite a few other features, and one called Library Books (nice to check due dates and it gives quick access to the renew page).

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