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Comment by rpwilcox | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

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