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GTFO of my menu bar

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Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#41

Post by ballard »

larrybolt wrote: post #19
rpwilcox wrote: post #17

The scenario sucks, and I really do like apps that give you the option (display in the Dock or display in the menu bar). There is Bartender ( http://www.macbartender.com/ ), which lets you shove all your non-critical menu bar items into a second menu bar like thing that you can hide away. So, while I have 18?? some odd status item apps running right now, by default I only really see the 6 or 7 most critical ones. Bar…

Bartender does even more than that, you can make certain icons reappear in the menu bar when they change for a certain period to make you aware of them. And combined with iStat menus I even make for instance my battery-icon hide whenever docked and fully charged. Also, quite some icons such as the WiFi, Volume, Bluetooth are only visible at all times in my case because I need a quick and easy way to alter the setting…

I use pretty much the same setup:

http://screencast.com/t/qlSsmaUCp

I have controlplane set DNS to dnscrypt-proxy after any captive portal nonsense. (Opendns UI is slow and broken.)

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#42

Post by gruseom »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #36
harlanlewis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything that puts crap in the menubar is crap. The Google Chrome Notification is an egregious offender - it appeared without warning, ugly and unretinafied, and can only be (temporarily) removed by (1) doing everything it asks, (2) then quitting and relaunching Chrome. It's highly-visible systemwide placement for minor system-oriented tasks, and unnecessary given how much interface Chrome already has to work w…

What does this Chrome notification thing look like? I've used Chrome for years and I'm currently on Chrome 33 and I've never seen this thing.

It's a little grey bell with an ugly and nonstandard menu attached to it. It showed up the other day on my machine and I had exactly the same rage reaction as the OP.

I ended up learning that you can go to chrome://flags and disable it—but not before Google had bitten another chunk out of my formerly positive feelings towards them.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#43

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

poolpool wrote: post #38
Pxtl wrote: post #33

One thing Microsoft learned is to empower your developers...but also assume they're absolute dicks. Since Vista, MS has learned to make the OS work around all these terrible habits. Tray icons auto-hide. The start menu is scrollable and searchable and actually digging through it is kinda discouraged. Apps that require admin permissions get annoying uac pop-up messages.

One of the biggest requirements iOS was designed around was "don't trust lazy or shitty devs" and people still freak out about the huge amount of restrictions placed on apps. I'm not sure there is any winning.

My preferred solution is to give both the developer AND the user enough rope to hang both themselves and each other. IOW, give the developer lots of options, but give the user just as many options to override the choices of the developer. But then again, I use Linux and Android, so I just might be biased.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#45

Post by kunai »

downer94 wrote: post #14

And so, as Microsoft Windows continues its precipitous decline, that bastard abomination known as the Windows systray icon finds a way to ride the mass exodus to Mac OS, much like small pox found its way to The New World across the ocean.

Except for the fact that there's no mass exodus to OS X. Market-share values have remained mostly stable for the past couple of years. This is more attributable to the amount of apps developed for the Mac as more developers switch to it instead of Windows machines.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#46

Post by ballard »

rpwilcox wrote: post #17

The scenario sucks, and I really do like apps that give you the option (display in the Dock or display in the menu bar). There is Bartender ( http://www.macbartender.com/ ), which lets you shove all your non-critical menu bar items into a second menu bar like thing that you can hide away. So, while I have 18?? some odd status item apps running right now, by default I only really see the 6 or 7 most critical ones. Bar…

Bartender 99.9% win. The default behavior of some status menu items not being command key movable is bad UX. Combine that with, as others noticed, accretion of icons that the menu bar lops off an arbitrary number of left side of the status bar doesn't help matters.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#47

Post by thrownaway2424 »

gruseom wrote: post #42
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this Chrome notification thing look like? I've used Chrome for years and I'm currently on Chrome 33 and I've never seen this thing.

It's a little grey bell with an ugly and nonstandard menu attached to it. It showed up the other day on my machine and I had exactly the same rage reaction as the OP. I ended up learning that you can go to chrome://flags and disable it—but not before Google had bitten another chunk out of my formerly positive feelings towards them.

Oh, _that_ thing. It's sort of tricky to handle HTML5 Notifications without such a thing. What does Firefox do?

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#48

Post by ballard »

lylebarrere wrote: post #27
geetee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just got a MacBook Pro and the Dropbox icon has been bothering me. Sure enough there was a setting for this! Thanks :D

I wish the monochrome icon for Dropbox would do a better job showing me when the app is syncing or in sync. That's the only reason I still have the color icon.

One approach might be to photoshop hack the color icons to greyscale. They're usually in the resource bundle.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#49

Post by ballard »

jscheel wrote: post #39

Evernote is my annoyance. When I quit the app, I don't expect a menu bar to suddenly appear.

Yup. I got tired of all the weird quirks and security issues with Evernote, so I used cloudhq to migrate Google Drive. The quality of the resulting migrated notes was surprisingly good.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#50

Post by Khaine »

ballard wrote: post #46
rpwilcox wrote: post #17

The scenario sucks, and I really do like apps that give you the option (display in the Dock or display in the menu bar). There is Bartender ( http://www.macbartender.com/ ), which lets you shove all your non-critical menu bar items into a second menu bar like thing that you can hide away. So, while I have 18?? some odd status item apps running right now, by default I only really see the 6 or 7 most critical ones. Bar…

Bartender 99.9% win. The default behavior of some status menu items not being command key movable is bad UX. Combine that with, as others noticed, accretion of icons that the menu bar lops off an arbitrary number of left side of the status bar doesn't help matters.

Thats because to enable that feature you need to access private APIs, and then won't be allowed in the app store.
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