GTFO of my menu bar | Hacker News Reader

GTFO of my menu bar

zacbowling.com

180 pointszbowling90 comments

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. If you want to add a cloud component to things, fine, just make sure it's 100% optional and that I only need to be aware of that option at install time and never see it again if I choose not to install it.

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 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.

> 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.

Of course on OSX the historical way to do that has been for the application to provide an applescript library.

> my biggest concern isn't their visual presence, but the resources they are taking up by being one of those apps

Next time, buy a computer with more ram and spend your limited time on Earth thinking about things that actually matter.

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

And why's that? Almost all of the native icons (battery, wifi, sound, date/time, bluetooth) can be turned off in the menu bar (set to not show).

Are you under the assumption that OS X can't be changed? 'Cause with plists etc, you can do a great deal...

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 or node-canvas than subject myself to gimp.

Just run those apps in a Windows VM. VirtualBox seamless mode is quite nice.

I reckoned that was an option, but since migrating to OS X, I have never had to have a Windows VM installed and couldn't be happier. Having to put a Windows VM in order to migrate to Linux kind of turns my stomach a bit.

It is if you don't use it on Ubuntu+Unity. It's totally unusable on that on 12.04 at least.

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).

I simply want to do more and more of my computing at the command line and with OS X I often find that every task I want to accomplish is a little more complex than it has to be, and that over time that all adds up.

Yeah that's true. Should always try to mirror prod as close as practical in dev, and OSX != Linux. So I use just one Ubuntu lts VM with docker backed by zfs. That way, I can ssh to it and predictably recreate any number of isolated environments. Way faster than vagrant and still provides isolation, although docker could be driven by it. There's always a need for some sort of deploy/configuration mgmt to bootstrap to speed up testing and reduce tiny difference gotchas. The other good things are that it doesn't sacrifice osx usability, no reboot is needed and it doesn't require repartitioning.

> the last time I used Gimp, it was excruciating.

To be fair, it's a LOT better since they added the single window mode. I've been using it since then and I am quite satisfied (although I am not a heavy user). Maybe you should give it a more serious try. Inkscape is also pretty good I think.

Apparently you can get Gimp to look almost like photoshop[1]. You can see it's a fairly simple interface. The screenshot actually makes it look fairly clean.[2]

[1]http://elementaryforum.org/forum/how-to/customization_aa/des...

[2]http://s16.postimg.org/nbs29omth/Gimp_Like_Photoshop.png

Hadn't seen that before. Kicks the crap out of GIMPshop! Impressive.

try krita, mypaint, darktable,rawtherapee.

Darktable is broken in fundamental ways and the devs are stereotypically F/OSS hostile to bug reports about simple UI fixes and usability tweaks that haven't been state of the art for a decade.

It's the standard F/OSS model of "open source replacement for commercial software" that has some list of features nobody but nerds cares about and is completely unusable for day to day work. It's sad.

GIMP is easy to use once you adjust to its peculiarities. Blender is the same way, even before it got a facelift.

Photoshop CS5 works perfectly on Wine. I had it running on Mint 15 for a while.

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

Please don't peddle this FUD here.

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.

I think a decent solution is to allow users to give apps permission to do things like that, but not have them by default and make the app work even if it wants those things. For example I had some browser extension that wanted to have access to my entire history, even though it didn't need it at all. If you said no it wouldn't work at all. As opposed to giving it some default value for history like "the only site I've ever been to is google.com."

You should be able to have control over small things too. Like "allow this app internet access" or "allow internet access only when in use" and stuff like that.

like you can do now on some aosp roms on android. Installing Facebook and taking away all those permissions is awesome!

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.

Bartender doesn't work with all status menu items, notably Chrome's notification status menu (maybe it's changed in the month or so since I last checked)... but Bartender "solves" the "GTFO out of menu bar" problem.

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 settings or be aware of them. This problem can be solved for me by automating these settings by profiles or my location such as School/home/on-the-move. This can be achieved by apps such as ControlPlane (http://www.controlplaneapp.com), you can even dimm your screen, kill apps that need a network connection to work such as Dropbox/Droplr/Twitter...

Very similar to what Llama (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kebab.Llam...) does on my Android phone.

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.)

Ditched controlplane bc the shell evidence source hangs. Using a shell script which is just a loop via a library launchdaemon instead.

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.

No big deal. If one wanted to exploit NSMenuExtra with an App Store app, a separate web downloadable "plugin" would be able to take over this sort of "verboten" functionality. Coordination via group container IPC would make this work (eg plugin present ? Tell plugin to do its thing and don't show the menu : fallback to crappy NSStatusBar).

"There's always a legal way around any rule."

Speaking of menu bars... I really dislike how the current application's menu bar can infringe on the icon bar on OSX. I realize that on Windows, icons also minimize, but on OSX you can't just show all the icons like you can in Windows. If I'm in an app with a lot of menus, I have to switch to a less menu intensive app to get to an icon I want (usually Hangouts) (is there some way to change this? - Google returned nothing). Back when I switched to OSX from Windows, I was baffled by the one bar to rule them all approach. While it has it merits, allowing the bar to show infinite icons and letting apps control their menu/options width detracts from its 'cleanliness'.

There's this app...

http://www.ortisoft.de/en/accessmenubarapps/

Essentially, "knock" the top of the screen twice with the mouse, and it'll switch to this application which has no menus. "Knock" twice again and it'll go back to your app.

Every application should provide a monochrome icon!

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

I found it (and still find it) very weird that Dropbox has an actual setting for choosing the color depth of the icon.

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.

That's a great idea. Thanks for the suggestion.

And a retina one!

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...

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.

> What is shocking is how many users report bugs about the app because they think nothing happens when they open it

This I can confirm. Worse: we got some bad reviews (app's not working) in the app store for this.

After we decided to display the dock icon those reports went away. More curiously no one has complained about the dock icon yet.

I hadn't seen Hush before -- neat idea! I only wish it'd let me silence notifications forever, or for days at a time.

You can! Just hit "continue without timer" and le poof!

Hold cmd-option and drag it out. Problem solved.

Cute but doesn't work with all icons.

Isn't the better option to just not install crap on your computer? This sounds like complaining that you don't like television shows on a certain channel when you have a thousand to choose from...

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 with. It sucks, but saying "you just shouldn't use Chrome" is a pretty weak solution for the small but conspicuous blemish.

That said, the menubar is a legitimate place for lots of things. It's great for services (eg dropbox), status (eg battery), and shortcuts (eg wifi).

It's a useful distinction from app icons in the Dock, which generally use more traditional desktop windows. I always like it when an app in the grey area (eg Twitterific) lets users choose where the icon lives. Like the author, I resort to Bartender to manage them all.

I wonder if menubar apps will eventually be moved into OSX's Notifications sidebar. I don't want them there, but I'd guess Apple prefers shoving into a drawer rather than sherlocking Bartender.

[edited a li'l so it made more sense]

Chrome is becoming worse and worse, just to push Google's interests further. I don't get why there are still hackers who don't use just Chromium by now.

Because Chrome has flash built in and auto-updated. Chromium does not. If you need to use flash, and want to minimise security issues, then Chrome is the browser of choice.

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?

Not tricky when your platform provides a standard way to do it already.

I remember when it first showed up on my machines, nothing at all would happen if I clicked on it. I only found out what this icon belonged to by successively quitting apps. It's the single most useless icon in my menu bar, it feels almost malicious. This prompted me to finally try and go back to Firefox...

Adobe CS and testflight are two pretty key tools that were camping in my menu bar, and both are tools that have been necessary for my job at some point. Not just crap I can do without

The TestFlight one drives me nuts because it's non retina. This is made worse by the fact that it's genuinely useful for me so I have to keep the blurry thing in my menu. (I upload 10-12 builds per week and it makes it easy.)

Crap like Google Chrome? https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=247814

Especially now that there is this apple-like bar in Windows 7 and 8. Applications like Skype or Evernote don't need to be in the task bar anymore.

For things like Google Music, I'm glad it is in the task bar since it is actually doing a background job that kind fuck with you (if you're squatting a slow wifi for example). Not having the visual reminder just makes me forget that it is actually running.

EDIT: I just noticed that they removed Skype from the task bar. Now I'm not complaining anymore :)

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/

I'm not sure being ignorant of things running inconspicuously in the background is much better than having an icon there.

The background one that bugs the heck out of me that keeps returning is the "iTunes Helper". I still don't get why that even exists on OS X. It's so un-Apple-like to have something like this exist as a Login Item in system preferences.

I develop in Qt4, and when you want to use cross-platform notifications without packaging the Growl API within your bundle, it is easiest to use the QStatusBar class. I haven't found a more reliable way to display notifications on all three major desktop platforms.

Unfortunately it clutters up your status bar.

Relevant: http://www.macbartender.com

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.

At least it's configurable. You can disable it.

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.

Nope. On Android, unless you keep a process in the foreground (with an ongoing notification), the system can kill it at any time. So that's perfectly reasonable on Android.

Right. And even then, if you open a resource intensive page in Chrome, it will often kill processes that have ongoing notifications.

Yes, I just tapped on my Skype notification, and Skype had died (restarted when I switched to it), but left the notification up.

This behavior makes me miss Skype calls from my mother.

Skype behavior is really the worst of all worlds.

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.

FWIW, I adjust my F.lux setting all the time! When the sun sets at 5pm but I'm still working in a brightly-lit office, I hit "disable for an hour." When I'm in a completely dark room, I switch it all the way to the dimmest "candle" setting.

The newest version has keyboard shortcuts (on Windows anyways)!

Also concerning is that apps like dropbox and adobe phoning home every time I power on my computer. Little Trojans just sitting there.

I never would have noticed that the Dropbox icon was the only colorful icon up there if I hadn't read this article. Oh well.

You can change it to be monochrome in your Dropbox preferences.

This drives me insane. As long as applications let me remove them I'm good to go though.

Well the Windows System tray crapshot makes a reappearance again!

#firstworldproblems

you always have the option to not install those apps...

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