The problem I have is too many things in my menubar. I like having all the info at a glance, but when I go mobile, only a few items fit before it runs out of space.
A bit hard to believe especially given the amount of time between the community raising the alarm and any coherent response from the new owners.
Still no individual’s names or contact info on the website.
I am a paying user who uninstalled the app from all my Macs and replaced with ice.
Ice lacks my favorite bartender feature (show the extended app bar when mouse hovering over the camera island) but I still prefer it to a shady alternative.
The same company Applause recently bought out Strongbox [0], which has been discussed a few times on HN a few times[1]. They have a pretty reliable history of destroy applications / extracting maximum value.
I love the idea of putting things in the menu bar, but it seems like the apps still have to be taking up space in the dock. I can't have WhatsApp, Signal, FB Messenger, Slack, Discord, etc. tucked away running in the background and popping up in my menu bar when there's something to respond to. I have to have them crowding my dock with half a dozen icons.
Is there a way to hide the items from the dock and just have them in the menu bar?
It’s super hard to make menubar show just the stuff I care about.
Tons of apps like Bartender or Ice can hide icons, but adding the ones I actually want? That’s what Badgeify do.
Plus, it can stay quiet and only show icons when there’s a message, so it’s not in your face all the time.
This seems like a polished, limited in scope version of what xbar[1] and SwiftBar[2] does. Personally, I love using the menu bar as the place for at-a-glance information. I currently use SwiftBar to provide status indicators for my audio devices with some hacky scripts I wrote to talk to my mixer.
glad you mentioned xbar, and your comment is ranked high (so maybe someone can help me out). I've been a long-time user of xbar, but recently it stopped showing up in the menubar on macOS 15.2. Even a simple script with just print doesn't display anything. Anyone else running into this?
btw. I'm starting to think xbar might be abandoned - it hasn’t seen updates in a while.
I agree that xbar's seemingly not getting as much love as it once was. I was also having some weird CPU resource issues with it, which all but went away with SwiftBar, so I'd definitely recommend swapping it out. The script backend is compatible with xbar/BitBar scripts, so migration should be pretty pain-free. I'm currently running SwiftBar on 15.4 with no issues (minus some interesting nuance with how it handles to menu bar items which I think is more of a macOS menu bar thing than a SwiftBar thing, as I had the same issues with xbar).
Every background service wants some screen estate in the menu bar, but the app that I need is always hidden behind the notch of my MacBook. Why can’t I hide the ones I don’t frequently need?
You can Command-Drag some of them off the menubar. It doesn't work in every case, but it might help. Plus there are tools like Ice and Bartender that help you hide most or all of them.
I don't think a project's core security concerns should be left up to my charity.
I get why they need the permission to implement their cutesy drag and drop interface.
But I'd like to hear why these apps can't continue to hide menu icons after you've revoked the permission. Ice and Bartender at least require you to grant it at all times last I looked a few months ago.
As far as I understand it works by grabbing screenshots of your menu bar and redrawing overtop of it. It can't do that if it doesn't have the permission to do screengrabs.
Calling it out only because I don’t see it mentioned - until last year, Bartender was one of the popular go-to tools to manage menu bar items, but it fell from favor after quietly changing owners, changing certs, general shadiness https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/psa-bartender-mac-app-u...
A specific and relevant reminder why open source is so important for system utilities.
Many apps offer hiding their menubar icon as an option. I'm always looking for that option and I managed to get a super clean menubar[1] — without sacrificing features or apps I need. The “11m” icon is from a little gem called Aware[2].
You should know at some point in the past year or so it was silently sold to a shady company which makes me VERY wary for something I gave screen recording permissions to. I'd never install Bartender on my machine again.
I am not! Bought the program about a month ago and it’s really buggy on MacOS 15. You can clearly tell that it was developed for some previous MacOS version and has been since then forgotten.
[1] https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
[2] https://github.com/xiaogdgenuine/Doll