Bartender - a simple app to keep your Mac menubar clearner

As much as I dislike Windows overall, one thing Windows 7 does do right is its system tray. You can drag the icons you don't want to see out of the menubar, and arrange the ones visible in any order you want. On OS X, the menubar apps are typically far more useful than their Windows counterparts. One only needs to peek at Fantastical or CloudApp to see how nice menubar apps can be on a Mac. The problem is that so many apps run in your menubar nowadays, and it can quickly get way too full.

So Bartender is a new beta app designed to keep your menubar cleaned up, much like the way the Windows 7 tray works. You can select the apps you want to keep visible (perhaps ones like CloudApp you want to use all the time), and hide the rest in a separate bar to bring up when you want to see them. You can download a trial now, or pre-purchase a license for $7.50 before its released. It looks like a nice solution to an overcrowded menubar if you don't want to actively police your apps and make sure only the ones you really want running are running. I keep my menubar apps trimmed down to the most necessary, so it's not an app I desperately need now, but one I'd definitely consider using.

There's only one problem: Bartender seems like it's filling one of the few low-hanging fruit featureson OS X that Apple hasn't addressed yet. It seems like an obvious feature that Apple would include in a future version of OS X. But, they haven't added it yet, and if you want to organize your menubar today, it looks like the best way to do it.

Read more about Bartender's features

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