What’s On Your Mac Menu Bar?

Here’s what’s on my menu bar from right to left (click on the image above for a larger version) …

Spotlight: I hardly ever use it. I use find from the command line as it’s much more specific. There are ways of turning it off but nothing officially from Apple.

Time & Volume.

Input locale switcher: used when switching the input method to type in Chinese.

Battery & Airport monitors.

iStat Menus: can’t say enough good things about this free utility. It’s fab. I have mine set up to monitor CPU and network but you can show other things too (disk, temperature etc.). They also have a wonderful widget called iStat Pro which shows the same system monitoring info in the Dashboard. iStat Menus also can be configured to show the date and will show a neat little drop down calendar when the date icon is clicked. I used to use Spy for CPU and network monitoring but it seems to be dormant now. Though I could download and compile the Spy source I could never get it to run. For a calendar on the menu bar I used to use MenuCalendarClock it has a few more features than iStat Menus which I never used and it’s not free.

QuickCursor: the latest addition. I’m using it right now to type this post. It grabs the text from a text box in Safari and opens a new window in your editor of choice - when you save, QuickCursor writes the text back to the original text box in the browser.

Default Folder X: A fantastic time saver that gives you quick access to recently used folders and favourite folders in the file open and save dialogues. Saving you from digging around in the directory structure to get to where you want to be.

BackBlaze: unlimited online backup for USD 50 per year. A bargain. It only works on Intel though. One of the cool things about this company is that they actually build and maintain their stuff themselves. Also they’ve published the plans of their Storage Pod so others can build their own.

PHTPasteboard Pro: remembers what you copied to the pasteboard (even over re-boots) and provides a pasteboard history accessible via a pulldown menu. You can set up filters that the pasteboard contents pass through before it gets to the destination application - e.g. paste text through a filter to Capitalise.

LaunchBar: a huge time saver for launching apps. Type the Hotkey combination (Cmd-Space by default) and a few letters from the name of the app you want to launch, press return and the app launches. No more hunting through directories to get to the app and double clicking.

There you have it. Next week The Dock. Don’t all rush at once.