I like finding out how other people are set up, their workflows and tips and tricks. So I asked around TMO Towers, and I got some screenshots and lists of what the staff at The MacObserver all keep in our menu bars. Check out what I found, complete with links:
Bryan Chaffin
Bryan's Menu Bar (click to embiggen).
Aside from the items supplied by OS X, here's Bryan's super mega menu bar, kindly marked up. He has...a fair amount of stuff up there. Bryan clearly needs to monitor all the things. Here's a nicely formatted list, skipping the items that are part of the default menu bar:
- Skype
- Dropbox
- 1Password
- MemoryKeeper
- f.lux
- Parallels Access
- iStat Menus
- Mac OS Character Viewer
- Time/Date (via iStat Menus)
Jeff Gamet
Jeff's menu bar, tidied up through the magic of Bartender (click to embiggen).
Here's Jeff's menu bar list. I'm pretty sure he was an early Bartender fan. Bartender is a handy utility that organizes your menu bar for you, whether you want to hide some items entirely, or just tuck them away in the secondary Bartender Bar so they're there for occasional use, but not taking up menu bar space.
- WeatherClip
- MemoryKeeper
- Layers (Jeff fears this one is near its end of life)
- Coffitivity
- Fantastical
- Bartender
And being managed by Bartender:
- iStat Menus 5
- iBetterCharge
- Transmit
- OmniPresence
- Transporter
- Skype
- 1Password
- SoundSource
- Tweetbot
- TextExpander
- SMARTReporter
- SlimBatteryMonitor
- Dropbox
John Martellaro
John's menu bar. Lean and mean.
John's menu bar is pretty low-key, with about half of the items in it supplied as part of the OS.
Kelly Guimont
Kelly's menu bar. Also Bartended.
I used to think I had a lot of stuff jammed in Bartender, but then I met Jeff's menu bar, and mine feels positively Spartan now. My menu bar looks like this At The Moment, sometimes other things show up and hang out up there. Not shown are regular residents Coffitivity, and whatever Pandora menu bar controller I love at the moment.
And being Bartended:
Dave Hamilton
Dave's menu bar. So menu. Much icons. Wow. (Click to embiggen.)
Dave’s menu bar is…certainly something. Maybe go get a snack and come back to behold it. You may be some time. It's certainly impressive, but since he's on a nice big iMac it makes sense he'd have more stuff than a 13" MacBook Pro. Behold the list!
- BitTorrent Sync
- Dropbox
- Keyboard Maestro
- Drobo Dashboard
- CrashPlan
- Shades to control brightness of an old (original!) Cinema Display in Mavericks
- Transporter
- 1Password
- BusyCal
- Adobe CreativeCloud
- Webcam Settings for a Logitech C920
- Synology Cloud Station
- ControlPlane
- TextExpander
- Parallels Access
- iStat Menus CPU meter
- Apple VPN Status
- iStat Menus (combined showing SSD Space, CPU usage, RAM)
- Eject CD
- OS X Keyboard Preferences
- Still more iStat Menus (combined date, moon and time)
As you can see it's a pretty varied set of options, with Skype, 1Password, and iStat menus being pretty popular. Clearly there are monitoring opportunities being missed, as Dave and Bryan make abundantly clear. What do you want to see from us next? I'm going to continue to poll TMO Towers for things like this, so tell me what you want to see!