Thankfully, the application has an option to apply a fix for popup window placement. Of course, not all apps appreciate being tossed in Bartender.

While I don’t have it checked (as I dislike icons appearing randomly and distracting me), Bartender can move an icon back to OS X’s menu bar item if it requires attention.

The app sees what menu bar items are active, and gives the user the option for the item to be shown in the Bartender Bar: That said, the “Star” icon is nice, too.īartender’s preferences are pretty straight-forward. This cleans up the menu bar, but still leaves the utilities close enough that I can interact with them when I need to without feeling extra friction.Īnd it can clean up many of the system’s Menu Bar icons as well, such as AirPort Wi-Fi, battery levels, and even Spotlight.īartender ships with several options for its icon, but the “More” item - shown as three dots - is the cleanest, in my opinion. The $15 app basically scoops up these menu bar items and places them behind one, single icon: I interact with the Backblaze menu bar item even less often. While I may hop into Dropbox’s menu bar application a couple of times a day, I generally don’t need to see what it is doing 24/7. The truth is that most of the apps don’t need a menu bar item most of the time.

Thankfully, there’s an awesome Mac app, Bartender, that can help rein in some of this chaos. Without these utilities, I’m less productive on my Mac, but the price to pay for all of these great tools is that many of them must live in the Menu Bar and create all that messiness. Besides the numerous Apple-supplied icons - Notification Center, Spotlight, date and time, bluetooth, battery, Time Machine, VPN volume, and Airport Wi-Fi - I have several third-party services taking up space: I’d be willing to bet your Mac’s menu bar looks something like mine used to:

Weather app for mac menu bar