GTFO of my menu bar • Hacker News Board

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#51

Post by ballard » Sun, Dec 01, 2013, 4:36 AM UTC

kunai wrote: post #45

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.

Apple lost a little ground to Windows 8 and tablets, where it of course dominates with iPad. This makes sense because some people were able to ditch their laptops almost entirely.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/10/09/mac-shipments-cont...

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#52

Post by john2x » Sun, Dec 01, 2013, 4:44 AM UTC

Another top offender is F.lux. You set it up one time and forget about it, and yet it doesn't have the option to remove it from the menu bar.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#53

Post by ballard » Sun, Dec 01, 2013, 4:47 AM UTC

malandrew wrote: post #12

GuiA wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you get to complain about these sort of things when you make the choice to use OSX.

I'm on the verge of setting up my MBP to double boot to Arch or Debian and slowly moving as much as possible to Linux. Unfortunately, neither Illustrator or Photoshop are available on Linux. Are their open-source equivalents anywhere near the quality of their Adobe counterparts yet? I've yet to try InkScape, but I know that the last time I used Gimp, it was excruciating. I would rather work via ImageMagick, RMagick o…

Argh yeah. Compiling ImageMagick is easier than using GIMP.

Surprised someone hasn't made a LOGO-like language for raster editing.

Is there any specific motivation to switch to linux? OSX might not be libre, but it mostly works (apart from setrlimit).

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#54

Post by shurcooL » Sun, Dec 01, 2013, 5:03 AM UTC

malandrew wrote: post #7

When apps install in the menubar, my biggest concern isn't their visual presence, but the resources they are taking up by being one of those apps. The Adobe updater app for example doesn't need to be anything more than a cron job. I only tolerate the Adobe app because I use Illustrator and Photoshop, but I certainly don't need the other crap like Behance and Typekit. the the Google+ification of services everything. I…

> I really wish all things like these were first written at terminal CLI apps first and that the GUIs were optional defaults that you could forego entirely.

I really wish all things like these were first written as public libraries and that the CLI/GUIs were optional defaults that you could forego entirely.

That way, you could write higher-level programs to automate tedious tasks, without having to write extra code that does the unnecessary work of wrapping around the CLI/GUI.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#55

Post by buugs » Sun, Dec 01, 2013, 5:04 AM UTC

baby wrote: post #24

malandrew wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the verge of setting up my MBP to double boot to Arch or Debian and slowly moving as much as possible to Linux. Unfortunately, neither Illustrator or Photoshop are available on Linux. Are their open-source equivalents anywhere near the quality of their Adobe counterparts yet? I've yet to try InkScape, but I know that the last time I used Gimp, it was excruciating. I would rather work via ImageMagick, RMagick o…

and Netflix. Although it could be good for productivity.

Netflix actually works through a special wine version now.

https://launchpad.net/pipelight

or (older)

https://launchpad.net/netflix-desktop

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#56

Post by vehementi » Sun, Dec 01, 2013, 5:12 AM UTC

Skype on Android has a permanent icon there. That team should be ashamed of themselves.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#57

Post by TillE » Sun, Dec 01, 2013, 5:15 AM UTC

vehementi wrote: post #56

Skype on Android has a permanent icon there. That team should be ashamed of themselves.

Maybe. But I think it's their way of saying "Skype is running and killing your battery."

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#58

Post by bjeanes » Sun, Dec 01, 2013, 5:39 AM UTC

So much yes. This is why I installed bartender yesterday and now my menu bar only has: CPU meter, battery, time. At the very end is a "..." that I can click to expand out to everything else, should I need it. So nice.

EDIT: link for bartender http://www.macbartender.com/

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#59

Post by tomasien » Sun, Dec 01, 2013, 6:32 AM UTC

I make Coffitivity.com and our Mac App is a menu bar app, and people love it. I'm not here to talk about that - we've never had a complaint about where it lives, where it lives is (as far as we can tell) is flawless in the menu bar.

What is shocking is how many users report bugs about the app because they think nothing happens when they open it, even though we alert them precisely to where it is with a dropdown. To a TON of users, that dropdown means nothing - there's no precedent to them for an app living there so it seems like just something to "find the x" to get out of.

Pretty interesting UX thing. Hush (coffitivity.com/hush) has the same issue.

Re: GTFO of my menu bar

#60

Post by Too » Sun, Dec 01, 2013, 6:32 AM UTC

TillE wrote: post #57

vehementi wrote: post #56

Skype on Android has a permanent icon there. That team should be ashamed of themselves.

Maybe. But I think it's their way of saying "Skype is running and killing your battery."

Yep, android has no other mechanism of showing if a program is running or not, except for opening the process manager. Some apps die as soon as you switch to another and some keep running even if you select the explicit exit-button provided by the app itself.

One could argue that the skype should be located under the common sync-settings though, such as email. But i don't know if that allows fast enough update rates for IM.