Marius Masalar
What’s In My Menu Bar?
Managing my “menubarnacles”
I was listening to an episode of the Mac Power Users podcast the other day, and their discussion of macOS menu bar apps inspired me to share my own setup.
My Menu Bar Apps
- Adobe Creative Cloud Still mission-critical for work, though I’ve been slowly transitioning tasks to Affinity Designer & Publisher (beta) where possible.
- Dropbox Still the best cloud storage, sync, and collaboration service out there.
- Sync A privacy-focused Dropbox alternative we adopted last year for work. I do not recommend it, I’m sorry to say…the app is buggy, the entire experience is slow, and the handling of file conflicts is very messy. Transitioning away from this one as soon as our billing cycle is up.
- Droplr A way to quickly share images, links, screen recordings, etc. I use this instead of Dropbox for those tasks because of the ease of generating annotated screenshots and screen recordings, and because I can have it set up with a custom short URL for a less generic, more trustworthy look.
- Skyfonts Handy utility for installing licensed fonts from various services and managing the installation in a centralized way.
- Pastebot I don’t use this as a clipboard manager, but I use its Filters to quickly parse and format image links for the blog and perform other similar automation actions on text.
- Toothfairy This tiny utility allows me to quickly and reliably connect/disconnect my Bluetooth headphones from the Mac and ensure they’re using the right codec for best sound.
- Backblaze My cloud backup solution of choice.
- Popclip Like magic powers for text selection all over macOS. You highlight something and get an iOS-style menu of options. The best part is that the system supports extensions, so you can add extra functionality like clipping straight to Bear, or pasting without formatting.
- Rocket A system-wide emoji picker that works the way Slack’s does, using the
: + keywordcombination to summon your emoji of choice.
I also use Bartender to keep my menu bar as tidy looking as possible. I don’t like having too many things up there, and the fact that the app can selectively show icons only when they have an update is ideal.