text 15 Feb How many menu bar icons do you really need?

My three menu bar icons

I’m down to four, kinda.

Let me start by saying you should work to eliminate anything that doesn’t provide value to you.  This being said, let’s look at all the applications I had that take up menu bar space (and my attention as well).  Note: You can remove any apple icon (or third-party app that properly uses the menu bar framework) by Cmd-Dragging it off.

Apple’s Defaults:

  • Spotlight: Thanks to LaunchBar I never use spot light (even for searching with spotlight as LaunchBar has built in spotlight search).  In Snow Leopard, you can hide the menu bar icon (without breaking Spotlight) by renaming your Search.bundle.
  • Date/Time: I have a hard time justifying ALWAYS having the date and time available to view.  I don’t see it as necessarily being relevant to have viewable at every moment.  If I need to check the time it’s only one button press away (F4 for Dashboard).  That being said, it’s one of the 4 items in my menu bar.  But it’s not the default Date/Time menu item.  This is a custom formatted iStat Menu date/time menu item.  It gives me the date, day of week, and time of day without the AM/PM indicate (useless space used… I know if it’s AM or PM).  It also gives me a nice drop down calendar when clicking on it.  If you haven’t checked out iStat Menus, you should do so now.
  • Volume: I have 3 buttons on my keyboard for this, why do I need another one that’s accessible with the pesky mouse?  The only argument for keeping it is the alt-click functionality that Snow Leopard has brought us.  It allows you to quickly change your input and output devices.  But with the help of LaunchBar, the Sound preference pane is about a second away, so I leave the sound icon off of my menu bar.
  • Airport: Here’s the first easy one, I’m not a heavy traveler so I’m not constantly connecting to different APs.  I have about two, I connect to often and these connect automatically.  Since I rarely connect to a new AP, going to the Network Preference Pane every once in a while isn’t an issue.
  • Bluetooth: Another easy one, how often are you using this menu to interface with a device?  We know you don’t have tethering, and even if you do, you know you use USB tethering over bluetooth as your (phone’s) battery is dead in 2 hours flat.
  • Battery: I use SlimBatteryMonitor to only show my battery when I’m using it.  If it’s plugged in or charging, I don’t care of it’s status.  I really don’t care about my battery until it goes below 20% or 30% but I couldn’t find an option to hide it until it hits a percentage.

Some other Apple icons:

  • Time Machine/iSync: This is only useful for initiating a backup/sync which I never do.  I don’t need to know the next time it’s backing up/syncing, or that it’s currently backing up/syncing.  That’s the point of automatic backups/sync, you don’t have to worry about it.
  • iChat: Really? There’s no point to this one.
  • User Accounts: This one is only needed for faster user switching.  If you have to have this feature, change it to the icon (instead of the full user name) or see if there’s a way to remove it completely via some fancy command line hackery.
  • Input Menu: Pointless
  • Spaces: There are keyboard shortcuts to view your spaces and switch between them.  This icon makes you use the slow and inefficient mouse.  Remove it promptly (the menu icon, and possibly the mouse :)).
  • Displays: Another useless icon.

Third-party Applications:

  • Dropbox/Wakoopa: This is a tough one.  The icon is useful to see when it’s syncing.  But I don’t care to stare at it when nothing’s happening.  Thankful Erik Phansen has a nice tutorial on how to make the inactive Dropbox icon transparent.  I use one of the transparent icons for Wakoopa’s Tracker as well.  The icon you need to replace is called icon_mac_menubar and is also in the Resources directory.
  • Google Notifier/Mail Unread Menu: Since Google Notifier doesn’t have push support, I have moved to Mail.app.  It was very easy to setup (just type in your email/password in the Add accounts wizard) and it does support push.  BTW, check out Google’s recommended IMAP client settings article.  I do have my dock hidden, so I don’t always see if I have new mail.  To over come this, I make notifications “Sticky” in my Growl settings for Mail.app.  I never miss an email because they are STUCK to my screen, until I hit the x (or click to reply).  You’ll need the GrowlMail plugin for this one.
  • Tweetie: This one’s a lot like Mail.  I hid the icon (in Advanced Preferences) and sticky the replies/DMs.
  • Adium/Skype: Pointless.
  • iStat Menus: This is another tough one.  There’s a lot of functionality that you can get from this app.  But I don’t really need to know the temp and fan speeds of my machine.  CPU is nice as I can quickly see why my machine has slowed to a crawl, but there is also a dashboard widget (made by the same company) that does the same thing.  The only problem I have with that is if my computer is slowed to a crawl, I’m going to have a hard time opening dashboard.  RAM is also nice because it’s another gauge to why my computer may be running slow.  And Network throughput is a quick glance at my up/down speeds.  I like to have this on all machines so I can glance at each screen to see which one is causing my network to fail.  These are all very subjective and could probably be removed, leaving with you the time, or nothing at all (GO YOU!).
  • FastScripts: This one is a neat little secret in FastScripts, unfortunately you have to run it every time you boot.  I’m sure you could make it run at start up.  I copied the Apple Script from this form post and bound it to a hot key in FastScripts.  If you are geeky enough to use FastScripts, this is all the instruction you need.
  • Bowtie: There’s an option to hide the menu bar icon. Do it!
  • Crash Plan: See TimeMachine and Bowtie.
  • ExpanDrive: There’s an option to hide ExpanDrive.  I always have it running and if the drives aren’t accessible, then I know it’s not running.  If I want to add a new one, I just launch the application (using LaunchBar of course) and add one.
  • Jumpcut: I no longer use it as LaunchBar has similar functionality built in and it works great!
  • Growl: Why would you have an icon for this?
  • NetworkLocation: There’s an option to hide it.

Now after writing all of this, I’d like to note that there is a use for those 22 pixels at the top of your screen.  And applications don’t use all of the screen real estate there.  So if you can find useful, non-distracting uses for this space then this is your time to shine!  I find my use of iStat Menus is a useful (but some what distracting) use of this space.  The way iStat Menus presents this information is quiet nicer than what you get from the command line.