[jwells89]

Menubar apps as they exist now haven’t ever really been a consideration for Apple for UX/UI design purposes. For somewhere between the first third and half of OS X’s existence it wasn’t even possible to have persistent third party status bar items without some hackery that made the system think third party apps were first party menu extras.

Even today the API they use is intended primarily for ephemeral status bar items that are present only when the host application is open and visible in the Dock, which is worked around by declaring the host app as a chromeless background app so it can stay open and keep the status item visible without cluttering peoples’ docks.

In short, the OS doesn’t have features for managing third party menubar items because indefinitely persisting third party menubar items don’t really have any place in the larger design. Third party menubar items are intended to be few in number and relevant to one of the user’s current tasks.

[krackers]

>without some hackery that made the system think third party apps were first party menu extras.

Good old MenuCracker