The Reddit thread recommends "Ice" as an alternative: https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice
I mean, promising, but a lot is still "in active development" and on the roadmap, including notch support, icon arranging...
macOS Bartender Auto-Update Signed by Unknown New Owner
31–40 of 115 posts
Re: macOS Bartender Auto-Update Signed by Unknown New Owner
#32Why is this not functionality that is built into the OS at this point? Is there anyone that loves 10,000 taskbar apps visible at all times?
It’s partially built into the OS, in that you can move almost every first party icon into the control center (via System Settings). That probably isn’t sufficient for everyone, but it was good enough for my usage that I never bothered installing Bartender on my M2-series MBP.
And yet people will swear blind that Apple apps don't get special treatment. Whether things like this... or the earlier days of Safari where it had access to some APIs around power-saving...
Or the most nefarious, where Apple apps were able to bypass most of the TCP/IP stack tracking and send traffic directly, regardless of any on-device filtering or firewalling, like Little Snitch.
And then they claimed it was only "a temporary measure while they dealt with updating software", but they never did explain why an app like TextEdit would have ever needed a kernel network extension in the first place.
That to me was almost certainly a post-facto attempt at justification when they were caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
Re: macOS Bartender Auto-Update Signed by Unknown New Owner
#33I switched to HiddenBar a few years ago when a Bartender licence ran out. It's open source, it's free, and it hasn't been taken over by a new owner who won't identify themselves. https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
> .... by a new owner who won't identify themselves
Idk, but most of software I use were written by unidentified individuals.
Re: macOS Bartender Auto-Update Signed by Unknown New Owner
#34In Bartender 4, Right-click the "..." in the menu bar, then
* Bartender Preferences...
* Advanced
* Uncheck "Check for Updates Automatically"
Re: macOS Bartender Auto-Update Signed by Unknown New Owner
#35I don't develop for Mac, so I'm probably missing something important here, but what is the point of code signing if the owner of the signing key isn't publicly verifiable? Is there not a chain-of-trust back to Apple that can be used to determine who requested the signing key?
Re: macOS Bartender Auto-Update Signed by Unknown New Owner
#36Ugh, this sucks. This app was nearly essential on MacBooks with a notch, since you could hide lesser used icons away to make everything fit.
man I add a few icons using istatmenus and don't even come close to the notch... what kind of icons do you have?
Mine are (R to L): system date and time - system control center - iStat Network up/down and histogram - iStat Battery - Dropbox
that fills about 40% of the way to the notch... 50% when I'm unplugged and the battery is showing time remaining
Re: macOS Bartender Auto-Update Signed by Unknown New Owner
#37I switched to HiddenBar a few years ago when a Bartender licence ran out. It's open source, it's free, and it hasn't been taken over by a new owner who won't identify themselves. https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden
Sadly it's as good as not functional (it doesn't even begin to work on my Mac). I used to use https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer and that also started misbehaving (and now the shortcut won't work). I used hidden's fork as well which also doesn't work. Ice doesn't work either. All of these apps are abandoned.
Re: macOS Bartender Auto-Update Signed by Unknown New Owner
#38If I wanted to poison update a bunch of developers who likely work at major US tech companies, this is exactly the type of software I would target for "purchase".
Exactly, I've been called draconian in the past... but that's why I'm hesitant to add nearly anything.
With LLMs my usual barometers may not be that effective; documentation/perceived mindshare. Usually if my peers know about it... I'll call it decent.
That stopped being fine for browser extensions like Adblockers and it's expanding. Land grabs in every domain!
Re: macOS Bartender Auto-Update Signed by Unknown New Owner
#39Interesting. Today I kept getting notifications that “Spotlight” was updated and it was asking me permissions to allow access to its previous version data. I thought that was odd for system service and I kept rejecting it but it kept coming up. I finally clicked except and start looking through my task manager to see if anything was off but everything looked OK so I wasn’t really sure it was going on.
Bartender is installed through SetApp. I wonder if it’s related. I’m going to uninstall reboot and run system scan.
Re: macOS Bartender Auto-Update Signed by Unknown New Owner
#40I don't develop for Mac, so I'm probably missing something important here, but what is the point of code signing if the owner of the signing key isn't publicly verifiable? Is there not a chain-of-trust back to Apple that can be used to determine who requested the signing key?
There is, kind of. Each developer is identified by a “team ID”, which appears in the Common Name of these certificates. Apple does some validation of the developer’s legal entity, similar to EV SSL.