macOS Bartender Auto-Update Signed by Unknown New Owner
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Edit: Nope, no change and the last update was 2 years ago.
Ice ( https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice ) doesn't currently handle this either, but it's "on the roadmap" ( https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/issues/1#issuecomment-192... ) and it's being updated.
Idk, but most of software I use were written by unidentified individuals.
Hiding icons is the only use-case I have, same as you.
Ice ( https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice ) also works, although it's still missing a lot of stuff and also still doesn't have anything to work around the notch. It's being updated though.
If no app works, then it might be something to do with your setup? Maybe some app you use or some change you've made? Very annoying in any case.
No idea what I changed. When I install back Dozer it starts working fine (with Shortcut not working). Then if I have to uninstall the Dozer I clear all files related to it using AppCleaner. So I guess that doesn't interfere either.
I will maybe debug it one of these days when I have some time.
Thanks for the help!
Last update: 2 years ago
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!
I plan to keep running the app without updating until it breaks or I find something I like better. I hate when beloved software (effectively) goes away.
https://www.macbartender.com/b5blog/A-New-Chapter-for-Barten... https://surteesstudios.com/a-new-chapter/
Had this come out then, I'd be worried. But given how it went now, I'm super worried.
As you said, I don't think knowing that Applause (applause.dev) is the acquiring company helps much considering they have no track record of anything as far as I can see, but having a full day of radio silence must have done some considerable damage.
Surtees had a bunch of accumulated trust from having been maintaining Bartender for over a decade and not having done anything abusive with it in that time. A new developer is starting from scratch there, and the first impression being that they're trying to avoid people knowing about them doesn't make us jump to trusting them. (That's why people are being more inclined to trust random apps from unknowns like Hidden Bar or Ice...)
You can add feature requests there, it should be pretty simple to extend BTT to support the remaining required features.
Something that I'd love to have is an easy way to show menu items that aren't visible because there's not enough space in the menu bar. I often have to switch to a different app with fewer text items in the menu bar like Finder, which only has File, Edit, etc., just so I can reach menu bar items that would be otherwise hidden.
If you want the same appearance (and resolution) as a non-notch MacBook Pro, open System Settings, go to the Displays section, click Advanced... and toggle on “Show resolutions as list”, save that change, and then enable “Show all resolutions”.
Now select the resolution option just below your current selection. (The y-dimension will be slightly less, which equals the space added by the pixels around the notch.)
So - since people DO have a problem - there must be other things that a lot of users want to see but none of them are mentioned in the link.
But for us who do, it is clearly essential.
> "Ugh, this sucks. This app was nearly essential on MacBooks with a notch, since you could hide lesser used icons away to make everything fit." - LeoPanthera 13 hours ago
> "True, but it has been essential for a long time before the notch for those of us with a non-trivial amount of software. The menu bar is a popular spot and so many apps want to put an icon there." - Tagbert 13 hours ago
And that's just from a quick glance.
Most users don't even know it's possible to improve their UI with this third party tool. I bet if they knew it would be considered very important to the mas well.
Specially power users who fight with screen space.
Rectangle and Contexts are extensions I use to make Mac OS closer to Windows or Linux in comfort, but they're not what I'd consider essential.
An interesting thing happened while I was enumerating the tweaks I had installed. Some of their menu bar icons were hiding under my notch without my even realising! Completely lacking an overflow indication is embarrassingly sloppy, and I might have to grab something like Bartender now too.
Edit: see https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/406316/can-the-spa...
These settings looked good to me:
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 5
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 8
I've been using Bartender for a very long time. I got rid of it about a year ago. These days, I think and ponder over multiple times before introducing a Menubar App.
- Of course, do I feel the pain if I don't have this one?
- Can this be hidden altogether?
- Is the icon monochrome? Colored icons are outright rejected.
Between the Control Center and the limitations I set for myself, I've survived so far. Let's see where this goes.
* Bartender Preferences...
* Advanced
* Uncheck "Check for Updates Automatically"
``` defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSelectionPadding -int 6 defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain NSStatusItemSpacing -int 6
##After running these commands, you need to log out and log back in ```
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
You'd expect macOS to properly support the notch after 3 generations of laptops with them, but nope.
Bartender is installed through SetApp. I wonder if it’s related. I’m going to uninstall reboot and run system scan.
While searching for how to move anything out of hiding, I also landed on https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice/issues/29#issuecomment-19.... Apparently Ice can only hide one segment of the menu bar at once, so if the icons are rearranged for some reason, they can show up in a wrong section. Author promises a future update will fix this, but at the moment Bartender is still the best option unfortunately.
Meanwhile, keep an eye out on how things develop...
5.0.49 is still signed by Surtees Studios Limited
I'd hope for Apple to actually incorporate this into the fucking OS itself so that we didn't run through these hoops for pretty basic functionality that has been in Windows for what, two decades?
The value proposition of these kind of third party UI apps is that the developer cleverly figured out how to manipulate Apple's APIs to do something Apple didn't really intend. Apple themselves can just write their own private API to do it, they don't need the clever hacks.
And that this app is popular with people in tech?
Would a Little Snitch block cover the risk for some?
I sometimes wonder about all the homebrew stuff devs use....
The trigger can be “Double-click Main Menubar” and the action “Show / Hide Menu Bar Icons left of the BTT Icon.”
You can even add actions to hide them again after a certain number of seconds or minutes.
(It’s only a partial replication because Bartender can show you the additional icons in a secondary bar, if needed).
Rectangle, or some sort of default way to control application windows with your keyboard.
Mos / UnnaturalScrollWheels: if you use a docking station, you may want natural scrolling when using your laptop as a laptop, and normal scrolling when using a mouse. Windows and Linux both have this solved for 15 years now, I am amazed Apple continues to ignore this.
Alfred: Apple’s Spotlight app has come a long way but I want to lock, restart and shut down my computer with my keyboard. There are some shortcuts but honestly I can never remember the key combinations. It would be much easier to command + space, type “shut down” and the computer shuts down.
Sometimes when cmd+tab'ing between apps it'll bring the selected window to the foreground, and sometimes it won't. They'll regain focus for typing, but are hidden behind another window for whatever reason. Fully open windows too, not minimized or anything. Was driving me mad having to click between IntelliJ and Chrome hundreds of times while doing web UI work instead of quick switching with the keyboard.
Finding it was quite literally what enabled me to finally move from Windows to Mac.
I have never had any desire on any OS to search the web, or the app store, or even my files for that matter (without doing so deliberately). Having everything mangled together is so distracting to me and only slows me down. Started liking my M1 Macbook Pro so much more after I discovered Alfred while searching for any tricks that would let me pare down Spotlight to essentially nothing.
I debloated my Windows 11 search to do close to the same thing (although not quite as good as Alfred) and remapped search hotkeys to be consistent across both platforms which is just so pleasant as someone who routinely needs to switch between MacOS and Windows.
If you don’t already know this combo, cmd-? (AKA cmd-shift-/) will drop down the “help” menu in most applications that run in macOS. From there, I use the arrow keys to move to other menus. It’s just one nearly universal hotkey and it works for almost all menu items.
I don’t know if Restart or Shutdown are allowable choices.
logout: cmd + shift + Q
Raycast[1] is the new (and preferred) kid on the block.
I want to see almost none. For all of Apple’s insistence on design and clean, the menu bar and those hideous icons always there was the worst one ever.
I’ve been a Bartender user for over 10 years (I believe 12) and I’m now really fucking sad.
This says more about app devs than it does about users.
If you are visually impaired, you also likely have greatly reduced space for those icons, especially when undocked. (This issue plagues me personally.) In that case, this is not merely a clutter issue: app icons will simply be truncated from the menu bar, and in some cases that may mean that some functionality is just totally inaccessible to you.
For me, I was already paying for “clean my Mac” and fantastical which both cost the same or more than a SetApp subscription which includes dozens of additional apps.
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.
But I can't imagine contortions around "yeah, it's an exceptionally simple bundled text editor but trust us, it really needed that network kernel extension."
Even today the API they use is intended primarily for ephemeral status bar items that are present only when the host application is open and visible in the Dock, which is worked around by declaring the host app as a chromeless background app so it can stay open and keep the status item visible without cluttering peoples’ docks.
In short, the OS doesn’t have features for managing third party menubar items because indefinitely persisting third party menubar items don’t really have any place in the larger design. Third party menubar items are intended to be few in number and relevant to one of the user’s current tasks.
Good old MenuCracker
Why put time and effort into something like this when the focus should only be on AI?