My Menu Bar

While I was looking for a weather app for my Menu Bar, I came across a site where people post their Menu Bars. As someone who likes to post my iPhone home screen (but always forget to do it), I was a huge fan of this site. And I wanted to share mine.

I’ll just go left to right.

Skitch – Not always open, only when I need to take a screen shot, like now. It’s great for taking a quick screen shot, editing it, drawing on it, and taking full page shots out of Safari. It’s free on the Mac App Store. Evernote bought them and made it free.

Dropbox – Shouldn’t need to explain Dropbox. Not sure it really needs an icon, it only lets me know if it’s updating. I didn’t see a setting to hide it.

Meteorologist – This is what I found to replace WeatherBug. It has tons of settings, so try everything out. The drop down can be setup to show the forecast for the next few days and quickly switch between cities. You can even have it rotate between cities (and display the city name).

Divvy – Saw this deal for $1.99 on the Mac App Store last week. It’s a quick way of sizing windows to a grid. Of course you can just resize your windows, but I’ve found this handy so far. Mac OS doesn’t handle switching between laptop and monitor modes and my windows wind up all over the place when I switch.

YouControl Tunes – Free
Skip Tunes – 99 cents
Yes, two of these. I’ll explain. I feel like I’ve had YouControl since I got my Mac. It let me control iTunes and rate tracks. I just recently removed the rating stars from the menu bar since I don’t listen to my music in iTunes anymore. I still use iTunes for podcasts (sadly), so I still wanted those controls (actually I only need Play/Pause, so I think I’ll remove ‘Next’).

I listen to all my music in Spotify. So I found Skip Tunes. It actually works with both Spotify and iTunes (and Rdio). However, it isn’t as easy to quickly flip between them, you have to go into the Preferences and it’s enough of a hassle that I’m keeping both of these until Skip Tunes gives me a way of quickly switching between apps.

Eye-Fi – You have an Eye-Fi, right? You should.

Time Machine – For some reason the ‘Back Up Now’ option is only available with this drop down. It also let’s me know if the disk is active. Otherwise, not much need for the icon.

The Rest – You have all of these. I keep the volume up there to easily see if the sound is muted. A very handy thing for when sitting in class. I also remember taking a lot of time to customize the time to the format I wanted.

That’s my Menu Bar. It doesn’t change very often but the WeatherBug issue had me thinking about it and led me to looking for something to control Spotify. Maybe I’ll do my Dock next.

WeatherBug Note: I had been using WeatherBug to show the temperature on my Menu Bar but found that a bug in the app was causing my Mac to take more than 30 seconds to go to sleep. As soon as I quit WeatherBug, sleeping took less than 3 seconds.