787: Revisiting Our Mac Menu Bars
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Welcome to Mac Power Users. I'm David Sparks and joined as always by your friend of mine, Mr. Stephen Hackett. How's it going, Stephen? It's good, David. How are you? Excellent. We're going to talk about menu bars. All those nerdy little utility apps that we've got in our menu bars today. This is red meat for me, baby. I got a lot to talk about. Yeah, yeah. It's been a minute since we've touched on this and

My setup has changed a little bit, and your list is a lot longer than mine. So we're going to get into this. I have a problem. I'll admit that right now at the beginning. But yeah, it's going to be a fun episode today talking about menu bars. There's a little bit of controversy around the menu bar app, Bartender. We're going to get into that later. We're also going to talk about just general strategies for menu bars today.

And then in the more power users today, which is the ad for extended version of the show, Apple announced new hardware this week. So we're going to go through that as well. A lot of stuff. Macs, iPads. Good times. Mac Studio got an update. That's kind of nice. Yes. One that I have many questions about. So we will get to that. Yeah, we will.

I have thoughts as well. So I think we'll just figure it out. Before we get into this, there's a note in here. Because I took a little vacation last week. And Stephen said, David was on vacation. So Stephen put Apple History in the outline. I did. That's kind of like when you're away, I talk about woodworking and obsidian. And when I'm away, you talk about Apple History. I guess we figured it out. We did. We did. I mean, menu bar apps are such a...

such an important part of the Mac experience, right? They're kind of famously not on the iPad, and it is a very Mac thing. And for me, as I was going through my list and putting things into Notion that I run all the time, it's like, my computer is not my computer without a lot of these. And so...

It kind of sent me down a rabbit hole of like, where do these come from? You know, because in the, in the classic Mac OS, you didn't have many bar apps, but you did have the control strip thing across the bottom showed up in like system seven ish Mac OS eight. And you could get into things like, Oh, let me change my resolution or volume or, you know, turn airport on and off, you know, a little bit later into the OS nine days, but,

And that did evolve to menu bar apps, but not directly and not quickly. In fact, in the earliest versions of OS X, there were no menu bar apps. Mac OS 10.0 shipped with something called docklets, which were basically like things in your dock that

That provided the functionality of the control strip. So you had displays, airport and battery monitor, and they were just in your dock with like Microsoft word and finder and preview. And there was no way to add to those. Like it was closed down and,

But I think Apple knew that was not going to be a good long-term solution. So in 10.1, they moved the system stuff. So like displays, airport, et cetera, into the menu bar for the first time and

And that set off like a multi-year kind of time of flux where Apple could build menu bar applets, as they were called at the time. But to do it, you had to do as a third party, you had to use private APIs. Now, this is before notarization and the Mac App Store, right? We're talking like 2002, 2003, a long time ago.

And so I remember in the early days of OS 10, like, oh, like, oh, you can get this menu bar applet and like it does something, but it was kind of fragile. And I think Apple saw that people wanted this and responded in 10.3 Panther with like official tools to build menu bar apps. And so it's been part of the Mac now since Panther, you know, it's a long time ago. And like I said, a really, I think, fundamental part of the Mac experience. Yeah.

Yeah, and it's hard to understate how troubling it was for us Mac loyalists that we didn't have that access in those years because historically the Mac was very customizable. And we were doing all kinds of crazy stuff in the old days. So it really felt locked down. And they did it pretty fast, though. It took them, I think, a couple years. It seemed like it wasn't that long before we had third-party apps in Mac.

And frankly, they did it faster than they did over on the mobile side in terms of getting third parties in the control center. But yeah, there was a time when it was pretty rough. But since then, we've all been abusing the menu bar. And that's great. Yeah. Yeah. It's really settled out as like a mainstream thing.

You have, I think, some broad buckets of apps that can live in the menu bar. You have productivity or security utilities, VPNs, password managers, that sort of thing. You've got communication or information tools, media controls, which have kind of been absorbed by Control Center inside the macOS menu bar, which is kind of strange. Yeah.

And then things like cloud storage providers, right? Like one of the ones I always see is Dropbox. And so I can, you know, just keep an eye on things. And, you know, there's different ways that the menu bar treats the apps, right? Some apps are like a secondary option, like Timery showing the running timer or Fantastic and I'll show you the next appointment. You know, they give you active information. They update. It's almost like a window into the application.

Yeah, it's like it surfaces just a little something. Not unlike widgets. I think widgets do it in obviously more creative ways. Like menu bar apps are very limited, right? You are long and narrow and you have an icon and maybe you have some text. But within those constraints, I think developers have done a lot of really interesting things. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, another category is apps that are menu bar focused. Like, it's the app. It runs out of the menu bar. The one that you suggested as one of these is iStat Menus. I mean, you pop that one and you get a bunch of information. Yeah, yeah. You know, iStat Menus has a window you can open, but it's basically a whole application running...

From the menu bar. And when I think about applications that have pushed the bounds of what's doable in that space, like I set menus, like the front of the line, right? That's amazing what they've been able to do there. And it and others have options to hide the dock icon. So it like the only place you see the app or interact with the app is the

in the menu bar. Sometimes those are referred to as headless apps, right? Because they don't have like a space on the dock. And I've got quite a bit of those. In fact, looking through my list, a whole lot of them like are just in the menu bar. They're not in the dock at all. Maybe sometimes if you open one of them, if it springs a window, it'll also spring a dock icon. There's different ways developers can handle it, but it is really a very powerful corner of the OS. And

I think that I would imagine that when you're looking at like a Mac app, like if you're building a Mac app or updating a Mac app, this is, this is a critical part of it for a lot of different types of apps that, that people want to use. And, and for me, like it was so interesting a second ago that you brought up control center being customizable now in iOS and iPad OS. Cause that I think is the closest we come to something like this, like particularly on the iPad is,

But there are things that these apps can do because on the Mac, they're always running. They can always, like if you have a clipboard manager, it can always be monitoring the clipboard. Like there's just lots of things these apps can do that aren't possible on Apple's other platforms. That's a side effect of the Mac's age, I think more than anything that, you know, these things predate a bunch of the security models that Apple has kind of tried to force onto the Mac, but it's also what makes the Mac great.

Yeah. No, no kidding. Right. Uh, another category of them I would say is kind of like launchers. Like a lot of apps just put something in the menu bar to get you to remember that the app is there and get you into it. And, um, those are usually ripe for removal. Um, but you know, menu bars are kind of like notifications and some of the other stuff we do. It's a garden. You've got to prune the weeds and, um,

This is one category that I'm not very good at that on. My menu bar tends to accumulate. Doing the show was good for me because it forced me to pull a few leads. Maybe I'll pull a few more during the show. But yeah, that's something to keep an eye on. But also, I don't mind having a lot of stuff in my menu bar because it's useful. It gets me there. It gives me information or gets me somewhere I need to be quicker. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. But the best ones definitely are the ones that communicate some sort of information like the screen flow. And if, if there's a little dot on the camera, that means it's recording right now. And that's something I need to know when I'm doing a screencast and like this stuff like that is just really handy.

All right. I thought it'd be fun to talk about just a moment before we get into the actual apps we're using to talk about menu bar strategy, right? I really like to have it kind of organized and figured out. If you're listening, you don't know. If you hold down the command key and drag a menu bar at them, you can relocate it. I think a lot of people don't realize that. So you actually have some control over where things show up.

And that works almost all the time. There's some things that get stuck, and I'm not sure why. Like, just now, because we're recording the show, I'm using Audio Hijack. Ironically, it's not on my list, but Audio Hijack puts up a nice little menu bar icon when you're recording that shows you the recording status, and it's kind of nice to have that. But I can't move it. And maybe that's because it's actively recording, and that might cause a problem. I don't know. But the...

But generally holding down the command key and dragging allows you to reorganize them. Because if you have a lot of these from third parties, like that may not land in the same place every time, like you start up your Mac or you log in or maybe something updates and then it gets moved to the end of the list. Like that, I think has been a complaint for a long time that the, the, the mini bar is not like the doc, like the dog, like my icons don't move. Right. Like they, I've put them in the order I want them to,

And if Slack updates, it's not like Slack gets moved to the end of the list. And the minibar can be a little more fluid than that. So yeah, that command key trick is an important one.

Yeah. And it's a little squirrely, but it's worth spending time getting things where they want to be with spatial awareness. You know, like, like I know where the green flow icon is generally my menu bar. So I know exactly where to look or when I need to access a menu bar tool, I usually know where they are. So just to share a little bit of mine is I do groupings, like usually starting from the right side, moving over, I've got some of the key Apple stuff.

Then I've got like calendar and appointment stuff and like time tracking. Then I've got like a group of like key tools, notion, screenflow, things like that. Then I've got a grouping of like writing related tools, Grammarly day one. Yeah. So I just go through and I kind of put them together. I have a little AI grouping and then, then towards the end, I just get the stuff that is truly referenced and I don't need very often and

The more you are like that, the more you're going to get pushed to the far left. Because when you have a lot of apps in the menu bar and apps start loading up, you lose some of those because they get under the menu commands. Yeah, or under the notch in your laptop. Yeah, and the laptop is even worse because you lose that notch in the center. One trick there is if you feel like your menu bar has been lost to you,

open up a finder, go to finder. Finder takes almost no space in the menu bar and often will expose menu bar apps that have disappeared under other applications. Yeah.

But I generally try to do some grouping, and that's my kind of overall kind of strategy on it. I've got a giant screen, so I can put a lot of menu bar, and that's why I'm a little sloppy with it. When I'm screencasting, I do use – bartender, we'll talk about that later – but I do use an app to –

to just hide everything except what's related to the screencast. Cause I don't want people watching a screencast to just sit there looking at the menu bar, like, man, this guy's a problem. And, um, and then on the laptop, it's a little different because you know, laptop, you have got less room. So I'm more aggressive on the laptop. Yeah. How about you? I wish I did grouping or organization. My, mine, once you're into bartender or I've been trying vanilla, um, more recently, um,

It's a little chaotic. I tend to have the ones like towards the right that I use more often. You know, some of these like really just up here, not because they have to be, but like basically because they have to be. And so I'm not super picky about the order because even when my laptop is docked with my studio display, I am using an app to hide a bunch of icons. So I don't see all of them hardly ever. I will say, though, that

Control Center, which is managed through system settings, you can change what's in there to a degree. And over time, like when it initially rolled out, I was pretty, I wasn't in love with it. I was like, no, I want to see my Wi-Fi and Bluetooth all the time. I was like, you know, I don't need to. And so Control Center is really like, let me pare down what's in there. And that's been pretty good. And I'm kind of at a point where,

I actually want Control Center on the Mac to be more customizable. Like, could I put menu bar apps inside of there? Like, kind of turn it into what we have on iOS? I don't know if that's ever going to happen, but that would be really interesting to me to be able to stash stuff in there that's a bit more status-oriented than some of these others.

Yeah. But you can also drag stuff out of control center. Yes. Which is important to know. Like you've got, you've actually got pretty good control over that where you can have things show up. Like for me, focus modes are just so key. I didn't want to have to click into control center to set a focus mode.

So I just drug it out and I made the focus mode, a separate entry in my menu bar, as opposed to leaving it in, in the, the bar. So, or the control center, I'm sorry, I'm confusing terms between mobile and. Oh, I know. It's a mess. So control center focus modes I pull out, but other stuff I'm very aggressive about putting it into control center. Cause like you, I don't really need to see my Bluetooth control or any of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

And some of Apple's stuff is like a menu bar only, or some of them you can turn off. Like I don't have spotlight showing. I don't think you do either. But the clock is always shown in the menu bar. But, you know, time machine is either in the menu bar or it's off. You know, I guess that makes sense. But some of the customization, like Apple's given us a lot of it. They haven't gone all the way.

And a new addition, actually the newest addition to Apple's menu bar apps is actually weather. So in a recent update to macOS Sequoia, you can open the Apple Weather app and there's an option in there to enable it in the menu bar. And so, you know, weather has been one of the things like iStat menu has it. A lot of other like third-party utilities make weather part of what they do to get it into the menu bar. And now if you...

If you aren't running those other things, you can just have Apple weather up there. Yeah, nice. Yeah, they just kind of snuck that in. Like, oh, we did this. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by 1Password. Go to 1Password.com slash MPU to get 20% off today.

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So that website one more time, 1password.com slash MPU. Go check it out and thank you 1Password for all of your support of the Mac Power users over the years. Okay, so we've talked some history and then we've talked some strategy. Let's get into some of the apps that we're using. And I think we'll just kind of go back and forth. We have some overlap, but then we have some things that don't overlap. So do you want to start us off?

Yeah, I think so. I will just say in passing in the prior segment, I explained that I turned spotlight off. I think if you don't know you can do that, you can do it in the control center and system settings. So working kind of from the right to the left in order of importance. I also mentioned I already do focus modes as a menu bar item. But I think the first kind of important utility from a third party that shows up for me is sound source.

And this is from the gang over at Rogue Amoeba. And it's just such an improvement over the native sound settings that Apple gives you.

And it costs money, but I paid for it. And everything I need to do in terms of sound routing on my device can be done in this little menu bar utility so easily. Because I podcast and record and do stuff, I probably need this more than most people. But just making sure that the sound effects are

come out through my headphones instead of my speakers when I'm recording a show and things like that. It's just so easily accessible and changeable with SoundSource than it is kind of digging through the sound system settings. And man, this one was an immediate go-to every year when they do the software updates. I watch the Rogamiba website and kind of wait for them to get this thing updated for the new operating system.

This was an insta buy once I started testing it out. Yeah, it's really, really good, as you would imagine from Rogamiba. Yeah. They're the best. You know, I did a big project for them a couple years ago. They sent me like every old version of all their apps and I did screenshots of them on like old versions of OS X. I remember that. Cool. And they've had very interesting UI over the years. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I like what they do.

But the sound source from Rogamiba is an excellent menu bar app that I always install on a new Mac and feel a little broken without it. Yeah, that's a great one. How about you? So, yeah. So coming in kind of again from the right, I like that a lot. I've got Control Center. Battery is one that I pull out of Control Center because my laptop is like my –

My only computer. So if I'm at my desk, it just shows that it's plugged into a UPS time machine. And then shortcuts. I really, really like being able to run shortcuts from the menu bar. I've got a couple that I need to fire. Yeah.

Kind of at random times and having the ability to just like always have it visible. I go up here and it's like, I just have a few in here. Just like just a few that are really important to me, like on an ongoing basis. And I think that launched when shortcuts came to the Mac, but it's one that I use all the time. You know, I never do that. Like I put it up there when I do screencasts on shortcuts, but I never launched them from the menu. There's a great little...

utility for Alfred called Bypass made by Stephen Millard, who's been a guest on the show. And that, that rocks. I mean, I get shortcuts out so fast with my, my fingers that I just never think of doing them in the menu bar. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably faster. I mean, I'm going to write that down as something to look at.

Also up there in the upper right for me is actually one of the newest things in my menu bar is chat GPT. So I've been using it more. You know, we've covered it a lot. I also have it bound to a shortcut. I have option space to go to chat GPT, but I'm kind of keeping it visible in the menu bar is like kind of a reminder that I'm trying to keep tabs on where that's going.

Yeah, I have the same thing. I actually have a grouping of AI apps and Cloud and ChatGPT and Gemini because I'm testing. In the Metzberg Labs, I'm always trying to find new ways to look at the stuff and share it with the members. And so I'm always testing those three. I find that the Gemini app...

the menu bar app breaks sometimes. It just doesn't work. So I think Google's got some work to do, but that doesn't surprise me. They're not super into like native stuff. Yeah. But the, but the Claude and, and chat GPT ones really are glorified launchers.

Which you don't need, but I do keep it there for the same reason, to keep it top of mind. I see it there. I'm like, oh yeah, I should try this with ChatGPT. In fact, one of the things I did when we were prepping for the show today is I took a screenshot of my menu bar and I sent it to ChatGPT and I said, this is my menu bar. Can you give me some suggestions on better ways to organize it? And it flopped. It did miserable. It couldn't figure anything out. But I just thought, well,

The reason I thought of it is because I saw it there in the menu bar. I'm like, oh yeah, let me see how it does it. Something like this. But the, but yeah, having that there is a good idea. Yeah. Well, let me share a couple of mine. I kind of have an asset management grouping and that, that to me is like when I'm working, often I have an image or something I want to use from this place to that place and

So in that section, I've got the first app and the most useful one for me for this is called Drop Zone. Yeah. And it's a shelf app. They've been making them a long time. There's a bunch of good ones out there.

And there are many that are just as good as drop zone, but for some reason I can't quit drop zone. You know, I just, I got into it early when it first released and I got it very customized. So the things I like about drop zone is it's a shelf. Like you dry it, you drag something onto it and it holds it there. A good example is like I build a graphical image in, you know, Omni Graffle and I want to put it into a keynote. Well,

Well, I just put it into drop zone, the PNG into drop zone. Then if I go to keynote, if I'm working like full screen or big screen, I don't have to go looking for it somewhere. I can just grab it at drop zone, put it there.

But also Drop Zone has the ability to lock items on its shelf. So I've got the Mac Power User show art here and the Focus show art and some of the stuff I do with the labs. And so I've got locked items in there that I use repeatedly. And it's just click up in that icon, pull it down, and you're good to go. So that's another thing you can do with it. I'm going to continue, though, because they also have little kind of droplets here.

So I've got a folder on my Mac called burn bag. And like when I share something, but I don't want to keep it forever, or maybe even like, it's just something I don't need to keep forever. And I don't want it to remember to deal with it.

I put the file in the burn bag and it goes in there and then Hazel watches that and anything that's been there longer than 60 days, it deletes. So you put it in there. It's there for two months. If something goes wrong, I got to go back and find it. I can find it. But after two months, it just auto deletes. So it's kind of like, it's like an action. You drag the file onto the burn bag icon and drop zone and then it moves it there.

But you can also have it copy. So I have a different one to the desktop. And if I want something as a resource on the desktop, it copies it to the desktop. It doesn't move it. So it gives you like all of this control, you know. And then there's like third-party applets that can plug into it, like image search, email, YouTube downloaders. There's a whole bunch of them. And I don't know, it's just super useful and just the right amount of nerdy for me that Drop Zone has really stuck around for me.

Drop zone is great. One of my favorite things it does is you can set up like, hey, drag this file here and upload it to wherever it's like an S3 bucket or an FTP server or something. It really, really flexible. And there's other apps like it. But I think drop zone does a does a great job.

Yeah. And I think there's other apps that maybe even have some different and better features, but this one just works, you know, and that's, that's what I needed. So it's really good. So that, that's the first asset management utility that I use. The other one is clean shot X and both you and I became believers in this over the last few years. I was always the guy who said, I don't need that. I can do anything with a screenshot with the native tools. I'm Max Sparky, you know,

But then I think it was you or Mike who said, no, dude, you got to try it. Yeah. Mike Hurley has long evangelized this app.

It is. It's great. It's so good. Yeah. I mean, cause not only does it, does it take your screenshots and it can clean them up, put them on a background. It can do like a bunch of stuff that the native app doesn't do. It's got a history of them. So you can find them. It leaves them on the screen longer. The utility set that it has is stronger than what you get with the native tools. And then it adds a bunch of other features just for giggles. Like,

There's a setting in there, which is all with user customizable keyboard shortcuts. There's a setting in there to hide all your desktop icons. That's just part of it. So if you're about to record a screencast and you've got a bunch of junk on your desk, you push a button and they just disappear. CleanShot X, is that part of setup? I think it is.

Or I paid for it. I don't know one way or another. I got clean shot X and I'm a believer now. So I keep that right next to drop zone because in addition to pulling assets out of drop zone, sometimes I need to pull an asset from the clipboard history or the, or the, the screen capture history and clean shot X has that for me. Yeah. Yeah.

CleanShot X is so good to the point that if I have an image that I need to like redact something or mark something up, I prefer their tools over like the built-in ones in preview. And so I will like open an image in CleanShot X to use their markup tools. It's, it is so good. One that I definitely use countless times a day. And then the other, like the third piece of that is screen flow, which I already mentioned, but you know, if you do screencasting, um,

ScreenFlow is, in my opinion, the best of the breed. However, I think I need to say that with an asterisk now. The last stable release of ScreenFlow is 10.0.10. I looked it up yesterday. It was released on October 31st, 2023. It's been a minute. They haven't updated the app since October 2023. We got a whole new operating system from Apple and they didn't release an update. Nothing broke.

but nothing got updated. Yeah. So there's a, there's a real question right now about screenflow. Um, are they, uh, are they losing interest in it? So that may not be my screencasting app forever, but the, um, but for now it is. And, uh, and the menu bar app is, is pretty handy. So between, um, drop zone, clean shot and screenflow, I can get a lot of work done. Yeah. Yeah.

Yet Telestream, the parent company, they make a lot of things. And I was looking through this website. I understand your concern. I do. You mentioned CleanShotX. That's an absolutely great one. I mentioned Dropbox. That's another one of mine that's basically always visible.

But the app that takes up the most space in my menu bar, the one that I see the most often is Timery. I use Timery for my time tracking. And right now it's got MPU and a little dash and 57 minutes and 30 seconds. That's my running timer on MPU today. And it is a way for me to make sure I'm staying on task, but also make sure like the right timer is running and

It takes up the space of four other menu bar icons, but it's really useful to me to have a live ticking up timer right there in the menu bar, and so I'm happy to give it the space. Okay, let's talk about Space Hogs. I should probably go back and try Timery again. I mean, it's a great app. Yeah. I started using, again for the labs, I started using the Timing app about a year ago.

And timing is an alternative one. It's better on the Mac and probably worse mobile, you know, because it's a native Mac app that like monitors what you're working on. And it shows you the time that you actually were in the applications. And it's a very powerful time tracking app that doesn't take a lot of work once you get it set up. So I've been using that.

And I really like that, but it also has the ability to show you your active timer, what you're working on right now. So I did the same thing. Um, um, so that's, that's the one I use that that was probably be, we, we should probably, I think we did a show on it a year or two ago. Maybe we need to look at it again at some point, but, um, there's some real interesting uses for this time tracking stuff now. And AI only makes it more interesting. Yeah. But, um,

But yeah, so I'm using the timing app, which has the same thing where it gives me a big

a chunk of menu bar telling me what, what I'm actually working on. And I think the advantage of that is an intentionality bonus, right? Because when you look up there, you see it saying Mac power users and you're like, okay, so that's what I'm doing right now. And I'm not working on some other show or, or, you know, shopping on Amazon. I'm the timer's running for Mac powers. So I better be doing that. You know? So I like the intentionality element of it.

Um, another one that takes up a bunch of space for me that I use is fantastic. Cal, I know you're not a fantastic guy, but one of the advantages it has is it will show you your next appointment and how long until it, and that takes up a ton of space in the menu bar, but I find it really helpful because I've got the one to punch. I've got timing showing me what I'm working on now, um,

And Fantastical is showing me my next obligation and how far away it is, which is pretty cool. Yeah, that's something that, yeah, I'm not a big Fantasco guy, but that is something that I can see being very handy. Like the top of my first home screen on my phone is my calendar widget. I live and breathe by that.

My calendar, every event has a 15 minute like warning notification, at least in my work calendar. It's that is really cool. And I could see that being a very good use of some additional real estate. Again, you're giving up some space you could use elsewhere, but that's really important to you. And so you're willing to do it. Yeah, totally. And I have the space. So why not?

I guess while I'm on the topic of Fantastical, and I'm going to sound like a zealot here, but the drop-down app is very powerful. You click on the menu bar app, you see the full month, and you see appointments over the next few days, depending on how many you have.

I just think in general, it's, you know, it puts the weather in there. If you've got a Zoom call, it's got the join button for the Zoom call. So just in general, I take a lot of advantage of their menu bar tool. And I've clicked all the boxes. So not only do I use it as a calendar, I also use it in the menu bar to show me what's up and coming. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by Ecamm.

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To finish out my AI grouping, there's a couple little apps I've been playing with. I talked about Super Whisper on a prior episode of Mac Power Users. I'm still playing with it. I heard from some listeners that like it and some that don't. I think this one's a little polarizing, but it's pretty good for getting quick dictation. I hold down the right command key and talk, and then it shows up.

The other one that I have not mentioned on the show is a new app called Cotypist, which is by the same guy that makes the timing app, by the way. So another kind of local app Mac developer. And it's an interesting, it's like autocomplete on steroids. I don't even think he has it out in public. I think he's got a public beta on it now.

I will get a link and put it in the show. But the, you can sign up for it, but it's not even a for sale product yet. But once you install it, it does auto complete for you, but much stronger than what Apple does. Hmm. Okay. And, um,

It's really kind of a cool little app. I mean, I, I think I like what he's doing with it and it just depends on, you know, how much you like auto complete. And if it's annoying to you, then this isn't for you, but, but it does a pretty good job when I'm, I'm doing certain types of work of, of getting the typing in faster. So it's a, it's another, you know, kind of like angle on artificial intelligence and,

And I'm always trying to test those tools out because I just kind of want to see what's coming down the road with this stuff. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you have, so apps like ChatGPT or Claude, this kind of a sidebar, are you assigning keyboard shortcuts to these things too? Or are you interacting with them through the menu bar itself?

Um, you know, I haven't got to the point with them where I've given them like trigger shortcuts. When you mentioned earlier that you've got option space bar on chat GPT, I thought about it because right now I I'm using Alfred and Raycast simultaneously. So I don't have a lot of space down there to add one, but, but I think chat GPT for me right now feels like the most all arounder of these engines, uh,

And I feel like that probably justifies me giving it a trigger key. So I'm going to do that, but I don't have one yet. Okay. Yeah, I've got one for TatGPT, but not necessarily a lot of other applications in the minibar. Most of them I'm content going up there and clicking on it if I need it. Yeah, me too. And I kind of want to be intentional about doing this stuff. I don't know. I feel like I want to be...

This sounds silly, but right. It's like, this is so weird and so new that I don't want to become a habit that I just let chat JPT do stuff for me. You know?

Yeah. Oh, definitely. A little worried about it, you know, where you stop being more critical. You just accept that the robot has the answer. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and that's not, I'm not sure I want to do that. So yeah, I don't really know how it all fits together for me, Stephen, but it's an interesting new technology and, and it certainly plays a big role. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm going to switch gears and talk about files. We talked about that being a group of kind of menu bar apps. Time Machine, of course, is running. I've got my big SSD on my desk where I plug the MacBook Pro into. I also run Backblaze, which is an excellent app

uh, cloud backup service, uh, on the Mac. I'm just running their official client. Uh, but you can also get to like backblaze, uh, B2, which is sort of their bucket storage, uh, through something like, uh, like arc. I'm not running arc on my main Mac, but, uh, it is one that I, is an app that I've used in the past and under different circumstances. Um, and,

And a relative newcomer for me is the Google Drive app for macOS, which basically...

is like the Dropbox app where it just syncs things to a folder on your Mac using a Mac OS as like cloud provider, file provider APIs. You also get shortcuts to all your Google docs and sheets and stuff. Uh, and I'm using this with my work with underscore. So we're doing, we do everything in drive and sheets and, uh, you know, docs and everything. Uh,

But the difference is like we do that at Relay too. A lot of stuff for Relay itself is in Google Drive and Google Sheets, but we don't use Google Drive for like storage. We use Dropbox for storage. But David and I are using Google Drive for like storage of assets, like screenshots and, you know, media assets and those sorts of things. And so I, for the first time in a long time, downloaded Google Drive for desktop and

And it's been fine. I remember trying it in the past and honestly being kind of kind of buggy, but it's been pretty good. Occasionally, I will notice that it has just quit in the background and like, but I can just relaunch it really quickly via Alfred. And it just kind of hums along up there, making sure all my stuff is saved locally on my desk or get a shortcut to a Google document or a sheet or something.

Okay. So if you, now that you've got some, some experience with it, if you had to pick one Google drive or Dropbox, which one? For file storage, Dropbox, like the controls are so much better. They have revision history, all that stuff. Like Dropbox, I think is a better cloud provider for, for files. But you can take Google docs out of my cold dead hands. Use it all the time. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like Apple should have a menu bar icon or a menu bar tool for iCloud Drive. Yeah. Because we would like to know when our iCloud stuff is uploading and downloading as well. Yeah, because it's just like the little pie chart guy that shows up in the sidebar when something is syncing. And in Dropbox, you can pause sync. You do lots of things that...

iCloud Drive can't do. iCloud Drive just recently got the ability to mark a folder to be local all the time, but you've got to find the drive in iCloud Drive and then right-click on it and tell it that you want it locally all the time. There's not a centralized place for that. I think that would be a really nice addition. Keep Downloaded is the command name in here for iCloud Drive. Yeah.

Yeah, amen. A little late, but better late than never. Better late than never. That's the iCloud Drive story, really, in a lot of ways. Yeah, I agree. I also have a grouping of writing tools in my menu bar. Drafts.

which, you know, we, everybody knows about drafts and Mac power users, but I find their menu bar app really useful because I'm constantly dumping things into drafts on different platforms. And then when I get, you know, to my Mac, I want to get quick access to it and I get it through their, their little menu bar app. Greg did a great job on that as always. Day one, we've done a whole show on day one. It's the journaling app that Steven and I can't quit.

And if you want to do interstitial journaling where you just drop entries in throughout your day, having the menu bar app is actually really handy. And it's also an aspirational menu bar item. If you want to journal more, just seeing it up there will remind you to do it. Notion is where my production stuff ends up. Often the pipeline is, you know, brain to drafts to notion. So I keep the notion thing up there. What I have not played with their menu bar app. What, what does it offer?

It not, not a lot, but it does. It opens like a little panel that shows you things you've worked on recently. Okay. And it gets you into it really quick and it's got quick access to notion AI. And because I use notion AI and we've got like, we've gone in deep on notion. I hate to say this. Maybe we should do a show on it at some point, but the, um,

We put all the transcripts of everything I release. If I do a podcast for the labs or a video, that gets in there. All the stuff I do gets Mac whispered and dropped into the related records. So I've got this corpus of stuff for me, and it's really easy to search it. Just this morning, I was recording the...

the labs Friday podcast. And, and I wanted to, I was recommend media at the end and I wanted to recommend a yellow jackets album. I wasn't sure if I'd done that before. So I just searched notion and it would search all the transcripts of all the prior lab report podcasts say, Nope, that didn't show up. Okay, good. I can use that one. Yeah. So it's just like stuff like that. And I hit that off the menu bar all the time. Just a way to get to something, you know, it's a launcher more than anything else. Okay. Yeah.

And then the other one that's kind of related to that is Paste and TextExpander. They're word-related utilities. Yeah. Paste is this great – we did a show on it forever ago – this great cross-platform clipboard manager. It's really visual, which is nice. Like if you have photos or a map link or something, it gives you a preview of those things. And it syncs with a –

mobile app on your iPhone or iPad that includes a keyboard. So you can go over to that keyboard and like see all your stuff. Pace, I think is the clear winner for cross platform clipboard managers. I ran it for a long time, but kind of came to a point where I wasn't really using it. And so I'm using Alfred for its clipboard history. Alfred, by the way, I don't, it is truly headless. I don't even have it in the menu bar. Like it is invisible except for a keystroke and

But I use their built in clipboard manager because I very rarely need to copy it, queue up a bunch of stuff and then get it on another device. If I'm at my computer, I need something on my phone like I can do the remote sharing of the screen or iCloud clipboard like the syncing thing is enough. But if you need more than that, paste is paste is really good.

You know, I'm glad you said that because I have the exact same problem. I use the Alfred clipboard manager for almost everything. And paste is like aspirational. It's like I keep it up there and I open it up and it's pretty. And sometimes when I'm working with all that graphics, it's pretty useful, but it's not my main thing. And, uh, but I keep running it, you know, so there you go. But yeah, I'm using the Alfred clipboard history as my primary clipboard.

Isn't it great that we can have like multiple apps on your Mac that just keep a history of your clipboard? Yeah. Imagine that. If only on the iPad. If only on the iPad. Yeah, it's great. I mean, we should, we haven't talked about clipboard management in a while, I think, but yeah,

It's great if you accidentally paste over something, which we all do all the time. Yeah. But I can also queue stuff up. So I can copy a writer's name and a section of the blog post that I'm going to paste. And then I can go to Notion or MarsEdit and then paste the name.

Go back, paste the text like you can you can stack things up. And once you have that, like, I don't even think about it. Like it's just ingrained now. You can move so quickly between apps, especially with text. Once you kind of get your head around, oh, I have this layered clipboard that I can I can bounce through.

I think most of our listeners are wise to this now, but I remember in the early days of Mac power users, when I talk about clipboard history and I'd always get emails after those shows published from people saying, I had no idea this was possible and you just changed my life. So if you're out there and you're not using the clipboard history tool,

Use one, you know? Use it, yeah. It's great. There's a lot of them. Paste is the cool-looking one. Alfred is the good utility one. Whatever app you're using. Keyboard Maestro has one. You know, whatever. There's a bunch of them out there. Any of them is good. Mm-hmm. It's not a Mac Power Users episode without talking about

Elgato. So I've got two that are in my control center or in my menu bar. One is called Control Center. Good grief, that was confusing. Elgato Control Center is an app in my Mac menu bar, and it gives you control over any lighting that you have through Elgato. So I have one of their lights at my desk for Zoom calls, and I have two at my overhead camera streaming PC setup. Okay.

And it's so I can update them or manage them from the menu bar. But of course, I also manage them from my Stream Deck. And so also running is the Stream Deck software where you can set up your keys and what they all do and manage everything. Both of these things run all the time. Stream Deck is definitely something that

Like so many of these things, like without it, I feel like I've got a hand tied behind my back a little bit at my desk. And so both of the Zagato apps running, running all the time. Yeah. Ditto. I will say that I'm disappointed in the key lights because sometimes they don't work. And they seem to like drop off the network and you have like power cycle them to get them back. It's frustrating. I mean, cause you pay extra for them. You can get a light of the same size and,

for a lot less money. With just a switch on it. Yeah. And so that's my most disappointing Elgato product. Also because I have an Elgato prompter, I occasionally run the camera control from Elgato, which is where you run the prompter, but I don't keep it running. That's not an always load app for me. Okay. So you're just launching that when you have that set up. Yeah, when I need it. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Yeah.

This episode of the Backpower Users is brought to you by Google Gemini. Go to gemini.google.com and supercharge your creativity and productivity. I used Gemini for the first time the other day, and the most impressive thing to me was just talking to it.

You go live with it, and then it's just like you're having a conversation. You can just talk about your day or have it explain something to you and start brainstorming ideas. I'll give you an example. I pretended I had a job interview coming up and asked it to help me prep for the interview. It immediately started suggesting common questions I might get asked. Then I started talking through my answers out loud, and it would give me feedback. And it's all happening in real time, like I'm talking to a career coach.

That's just what I tried first, but you can talk to it about anything, and that's the magic of it. How you can have this back and forth, and it's all seamless. If you haven't tried it yet, it's definitely worth checking out. You'll see what I mean. And our thanks to Google Gemini for their support of the Mac Power users and all of Relay. Go check out Google Gemini at gemini.google.com.

Now I'm getting in my list, I'm getting into the land of private, you know, kind of like utility stuff. And I've got a bunch of those. So now we're, we've moved past the kind of the stuff on the right. And now we're getting on the stuff to the left that I'm not like too bent out of shape if they disappear under a menu item.

I'll pick a couple of them. How about, so one that I like that you might like, Stephen, it's called Supercharge. It's from Sindre Soros. And I know I'm mispronouncing his name, but this guy makes a lot of really cool little apps for the Mac. Like he made another one called One Thing where you can put one thing in your menu bar if you just want to write some text in your menu bar. Yeah, that one's great. You say you put a little note to yourself up there.

Yeah, exactly. And so he's got a bunch of them, but the supercharged one is interesting because it's like, I think he made a list of everything that's annoying on the Mac and

for him and for, uh, for windows switchers. And he, he just wrote a little utility that fixes a bunch of that stuff, like the copy paste behavior. And, um, you like, there's a button in there to turn everything grayscale. Like if you just want to like get the color out of your Mac, there's just a bunch of little tools like that. And, um,

I like it. I don't know. I kind of like it. So I've been playing with that one recently. I've kept it in the menu bar because I just want to, to remember that I can play with these settings and see what works for me.

And it also allows you to attach keyboard shortcuts. Like I've been experimenting with the grayscale stuff where like if you just take all the color out of your Mac, does that give you more focus? Science says yes. I'm not sure if it does tell you the truth, but you know, but it's worth trying. They have an app that I, that I like called today and it gives basically that Fantastical app,

experience to people who don't use fantastic cow so you can have a little icon in your menu bar and you click on it and you get just a really simple like text list of your calendar items for the day yeah and he also has one called menu bar calendar that just gives you a month calendar yep yeah it's pretty cool yeah great great developer worth checking out yeah

Another one he has that we didn't put in the outline, I even had, I just noticed it, called menu bar spacing, where you can customize the gap between menu bar items. You know, that might be something I should check out because I have enough space and I do have groupings. Why not have some space?

Although I'm not sure if you can, I'll have to play with this. I just literally saw it. But the, but I'd like is like to have spacers between groups. Yeah. And then looking at the website just in the first pass, it looks like it's spacing uniformly applied. Yeah. That'd be cool. Yeah. But like, what if you could put a little like space between like the, the AI apps and the writing apps, you know, that'd be cool. Yeah. Yeah.

People used to do that with the dock. Like there were all sorts of apps, like put a transparent space in your dock and like, or a spacer, right? Sometimes that like visual separation can be, can be helpful. In fact, I think supercharged does that. I think that's one of the things it does. Oh man, this person's making all sorts of wild stuff. Yeah. It's fun. I like it. Yeah. It's cool.

So that's one of the utilities that I like. Another one that is a kind of Mac Power Users Hall of Famers pop clip. Can't live without it. Love it. Yep. I have really embraced it after our episode we did on it a while back and use it all the time. One of the things I use most often is I can select a bunch of text on the web, which of course is in HTML, right? And with a single button,

I can copy it as Markdown so I can paste it into MarsEdit. Even if I'm block quoting something on 5-fill pixels, for instance. It's great. Yeah, so many good tools for that app. And a great community around it. A lot of stuff I'm running is built not by the developer, but by other users. Yeah, yeah. What are some of your others?

One that really scratches a particular itch for me, and maybe this is something that that supercharge app can also do, is called Reflex. So, and I've complained about this before, but for years, the media controls on your keyboard, so I'm looking at my Apple keyboard, F7, 8, and 9, those are called media transport keys, and they used to always be tied to iTunes or Apple Music.

But at some point in macOS's recent history, they became what I call floating. And so if you had a QuickTime file or something playing in messages, the media control keys would go to whatever was the foremost app that was playing something. And I found that to be

utterly maddening. It's like, no, I want these to always control my music. And I use, I even forget what I used to use. I used to do some like open source thing to do this and then it broke and it never got fixed. Uh, so reflex, uh, is a Mac app that, uh, locks it to, in my case, Apple music. Um, yeah, I think you can also set it to lock it to Spotify. Um,

But it just, it does that one thing and it makes my Mac so much better. You told me about it and I immediately installed it. I love it. And it just does the one thing you're right. But like I often play music through Apple music and when the phone rings or something and suddenly it doesn't turn off the music, I want to throw my Mac through a window and this solves that problem. Saves the window and the Mac.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Thank you on that one. Another one that's sort of along those lines in terms of just like making the Mac a bit more manageable is quitter. It's another one I've talked about before by Marco Arment.

And it basically runs like a internal timer for the Mac, the apps you have open on your Mac. And so you can set rules up of like hide slack after 10 minutes of inactivity or quit reader. If I haven't, you know, interacted with it in 30 minutes, you can set all these rules up.

And so over time, as I'm working, apps that I haven't interacted with for a while hide, just some of them. Things like messages. Messages will hide after five or ten minutes, whatever it is. Not everything. I don't have them all in here. But it kind of just quietly cleans things up so I can focus on...

what is at hand so like as we're recording you know my bounce into messages because you know if we have an interview we're doing on the show you and i will text sometimes during things like hey let's ask one more question to go to the ad or no i'm gonna follow up on that before you ask something else but a lot of times i don't need that and it can be distracting and so things sort of quietly go away over time yeah nice a couple useful ones that um that i have uh one is home control

And a home control is a home automation app that ties into home, but it shows you the status of all your home devices and,

And I have a lot of them. So it's nice to be able to see that, but even better, it gives you a URL that you can call to, to trigger any device. So the, the, the big feature of this is like, I can say, you know, set my studio lights to record. And then I can say, give me a URL for that. And so I get the URL and then I attach it to a stream deck button. Then I push a button on the stream deck and very easily control, um,

home devices so yeah it's a it's a great little app i don't know of i'm sure there's another way to do that but this makes it so easy that i have never bothered to look um so i like that um another one that i keep in the menu bar that really probably could go away because i have it as a widget

um, is parcel. Okay. Parcel shows you the status of your packages. And one of the things I was thinking about when I was going through prepping for the show is I actually have a pretty well-developed widget screen on my Mac. Um, maybe that's a future show. I don't know, or a future discussion in a feedback show or something, but the, uh,

But I, I go naturally go there and I don't need to see it in my menu bar that, you know, my, my cliff bars are going to show up tomorrow. So, so I think that one will probably get cut, but, but if you don't want to use a widget parcel has a nice app. Yeah. Yeah. I, I just, I just use the app.

Mary has a water bottle that's being delivered today by the post office, in case you were curious. Okay, excellent. Good to know. She misplaced her favorite one, so I found a replacement. And I got some Ethernet cables coming today.

It's very exciting. Very long or short. Uh, they are one meter. So they're, they're short, short. Um, yeah. Cause I'm doing, uh, I've been redoing my home network and I'm going to put a patch panel in the main network closet, which is just my son's closet. Um, so I got this really cool, like, uh, wall mounted patch panel, uh,

Which was hard to find. Like most of them are rack mounted, but then I'm just going to have like one meter thin patch cables in that to the switch so I can troubleshoot things a little bit easier. Look, is any of that necessary? No, it's not. But don't tell my family. It's fine. I expect that cabling is going to look like a piece of art when you're done with it. We'll see. It's going to be, it's going to be something.

I did where we keep our kind of network closet is like in a corner next to where the cable modem comes into the house. But a couple of years ago, I on Amazon bought like 21 foot,

uh colored ethernet cables like yeah it was not that expensive that came in a bag and man i should have done that a long time ago because anytime there's a problem now having a different color cable for each thingamabob you've got attached to the network boy does that make it a lot easier to troubleshoot yeah so on my switch uh ubiquity has something called ether lighting and

And mine I have set up where the, so like the actual ethernet port lights up and, you know, a lot of ethernet cables have like clear ends on them. And so the plug kind of lights up and ubiquity sells their own very expensive, unnecessary patch cables that really light up. Those are the ones being delivered today. And, and so mine I have set up based on link speed. So I can like see like what's running at 2.5 gig or whatever and,

But there's in the software is a locate button. So it's like, where is that plugged in? Hit locate. And then that ethernet port flashes the light on and off. It's awesome. Now, maybe not necessarily in my kid's bedroom. Is it strictly needed? But, you know, it's really cool. You know, it seems to me like every time you and I talk, whether we're recording the show or just having a buddy call.

You seem to mention your Ubiquiti router system. I've become one of those people. It's so bad. I know it's annoying, but I really like their stuff. You really love it? Is it that much better than the other stuff out there now? I think so, yeah. Wow. I saw that they have a cheaper unit now. They just released a $99 unit. Yeah, Wi-Fi 7, which is cool. I'm running fiber out of the office. My dad and I are digging a trench.

It's going great. Are you? Yeah. Great. What are you putting that in? I mean, what are you putting the cable in? It'll be in PVC. PVC. Yeah, okay. And it's a direct barrier cable anyway, so the PVC is just to keep it. Make sure to make those turns soft. Don't do a sharp corner. Yeah. Yeah. You got to be careful with fiber. And then the other thing you should do is just run like a piece of rope or string down it. Yep. And just keep it there. I had, I came across, I don't know.

David, I saw this in my garage. I have no memory of buying this, but at some point I bought or inherited or found a spool of pull string. Yeah. Like I was going to buy some. I was like, I think like I have this feeling I have some and it was just in the garage on a shelf. So yeah, there'll be, there'll be pull string in there. Don't worry. Yeah. We're going to have to talk about this ubiquity in a future episode, but I don't want to talk about it until I've got like spare money. Cause I feel like,

this is one that you're going to, I know what you're going to do. And that's why I can't afford for us to do a show on ubiquity. So I'm sorry, dear audience. You just have to wait. You just have to wait. Yeah. It's really, it's the Rivian of home networking. You could say. Oh boy. I'm getting that so much. I'm getting so much crap about that car. Are you?

Yeah. No, that's ridiculous. It's awesome. But I really like it. Yeah. I've got all my shortcuts set up. You just sent me pictures of it. You're like, look at it. Look how good it looks in my driveway. They did a, they did a software update on it. Just, I mean, that is cool. But anyway, whatever. Okay. So moving on.

So we're getting into utility space here. A couple more that I find useful. OnePassword. I do use the Menu Bar app in that. A lot of people just use the app itself, but I actually find the Menu Bar pretty handy.

An oldie but a goodie that's come back into my life is Little Snitch. They did an update about three or four months ago, and I went ahead on a lark. I bought it. It used to be very annoying, Little Stitch. It monitors your outgoing traffic, but now they've got it set up in a way that it doesn't bug you as much, but it gives you a good track of what's going outgoing. Like when I cover an app, I like to take a look and see what kind of traffic it sent out just to know if there's something funny going on. Mm-hmm.

And they've got a nice little menu bar. This one goes way over on the left side. I don't need it very often, but when it's there, it's there. Yeah. And then like, you know, the granddaddy of menu bar apps is iStat menus. It is. Yeah.

yeah, I love it. You know, I still love it and they've done such a good job over the years. I don't have it set up in a way where it gives me the whole, like, um, you know, like the heartbeat monitor of my Mac across the menu bar. It's just one icon that you click it and it gives you everything you need underneath. And that, that's the, my happy place with ISTAT. Are you still using it? Uh, I am. Yeah. I, I, it's not visible. It's hidden. Uh,

by vanilla or bartender or whatever I'm using at a given moment. Uh, it's great. You know, I spoke to them several years ago, I think around the Apple Silicon transition, it was just like a off the cuff conversation. So, you know, it wasn't reporting or anything, but it's like, they do a lot. I can tell you firsthand, they do a lot of work. Like when new Macs come out, like when the Mac pro came out in 2019, they're like, we have to put our hands on one so we can like read, get all the sensor data and stuff. Like,

It really gets a lot of work and it has come such a long way. That thing started as a dashboard widget. Remember that? Like that's what it was in the beginning. And now it's this full blown system to monitor your Mac. It's, it is so, so good. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, you used to have it over on the left side of your, your home screen, I guess to the extent you'd call a Mac home screen, but yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, great, great app. And like anybody, like the, the, the, the use for it use case for me is I don't monitor actively, but if something's funny, like all of a sudden I feel like my traffic is slow or my Mac is slow. I open up iStat and you can see very quickly, Oh, look at that. I filled up my hard drive or something, you know, something like that. It's all there for you very quickly. That's exactly how I do it too.

That was not true in the Intel days. In the Intel days, I wanted it more at hand. But now it's like, you know what? This is totally fine. I can just check on it as I need it. You wanted it because you had a Mac Pro and you wanted to see the line of CPUs, right? That's right. The new Mac Studio Ultra, I think, has like 40 CPUs. Could you imagine a menu bar with 40 CPU clocks for my stack?

You got to have a pro display XDR just to keep up with all the charts. Well, if you can afford that, you can probably afford a pro display. So there you go. Yeah. Some others, utility types for me. Loom is a huge part of my workflow these days. Maybe this one is more than utility. It's all it is, is it's a web service. It's a subscription, but you, you look at the camera and you can quickly record a video and,

And you can do it of your screen or just your face or both. And then it saves it to them. They've got basic AI and edit tools there to kind of clean it up for you. And you can send a link to somebody. And I do it all the time for like when I'm interacting, like,

with someone that sends me an email and I feel like I want to send a personal video back because the topic deserves it. Or if I just want to tell customer support stuff, JF does that for me. I've made videos for him of every single thing I do. If somebody writes in with this problem, I fix it, but I run a Loom video and then I put the link in Notion. And so he can always go back and look at how I did it when he takes over that task. So it's just like there's a ton of use for this thing

And, um, and I know there's probably free services out there and there's competitors, but I, I stumbled into loom a couple of years ago and this one is a winner for me. Yeah. I feel like as we round the corner here, we should talk about what I refer to as like MPU classics. Uh, okay. So these are things like for me, uh, Hazel, uh,

keyboard maestro we've mentioned text expander and one password uh really like standby like true important apps that make the mac the mac for me yeah is default folder x on that list for you do you use it it is not but i know you do yeah i was just curious if you use it or not yeah

I don't know if I need it anymore as things keep evolving, but I've got a habit of using it. So I've got it up there. I was looking at that one. I don't use the menu bar element of it at all. It's cool. You know, it's got a bunch of links to commonly used folders and things, but I just never find myself going up there. That one may fall out of the menu bar in the next audit.

Carbon copy cloner is there for both of us too. And that I think is kind of entering the MPU hall of fame as well. I used super duper forever. I don't remember why, but for some reason I had a, I went over to carbon copy cloner. Maybe it was when Apple was switching the file system or something and

I think they're interchangeable. I think they're both really good, but I've just been using carbon copy cloner now. So that one's up there too. Yep. For me, it mounts a drive, uh,

clones my data to that drive every night and then ejects the drive and it just happens seamlessly i also have it running on my mac mini like sort of you know under the tv mac mini for a couple things it's great both it and super duper have really good user interfaces to manage like copy this data from here to here and like do these things with it um i agree with you they're both good and

Carbon Copy Cleaner is just kind of the one I landed on 100 years ago. And so I have, I mean, it's been the menu bar of my Macs basically forever. And they do two very different things. But Setapp is that subscription app service. And I keep it in the menu bar because a lot of times apps get updates or they actually update you on the news on what they've got. And I like to keep up with that. So I look for the little red dot in it. And that just reminds me to do it.

This is from MacPaw and they also make CleanMyMac, which is part of my setup subscription. But CleanMyMac is just a great little convenience tool. Every time this one comes up, I hear from listeners say, well, I can do all this in the terminal. I don't need any of that. And I'm like, I get it. But, you know, I just want it simple. And they keep adding features to it.

Now it's looking for malicious software and doing a whole bunch of stuff that I wouldn't be doing otherwise. So I keep it up there. It pesters me once in a while and says, hey, you haven't run CleanMyMac in like a month. And I actually want to do that every month, but I'm not going to add it to OmniFocus or anything. So I don't mind it being in the menu bar reminding me once in a while to do something. So I keep that one up there too. Yeah.

Yeah. I, clean my Mac is great. Uh, I, my description actually just renewed a couple of days ago. So yeah, it's, it's one that I don't leave it running. It's, it's like every once in a while I'll fire it up and make sure there's nothing going on that, uh, that need to know about. Uh, I think we hit them all buddy. I think so. I mean, there's so many good things out there. Um,

And, you know, but then there's also some things that I kind of feel like I'm forced to run. Like, I don't really want to run the Adobe Creative Cloud app, but I pay for a bunch of Adobe apps and use a bunch of Adobe apps every day. And so that's hanging out there. But yeah, it's one of those things that makes the Mac the Mac.

A couple I missed here. I'm just looking through my list. Better touch tool. Yeah. Better touch tool. I use better snap tool for some window management stuff by the same developer. Same developer. Yeah. Moom, which I still think is a great window management tool, although I'm using it less because the built-in window management tools and Mac OS have gotten so much better.

But I still like the ability to have custom setups, which Apple's never going to support. Yeah. And then I have one, I think it's from Apple. It's a UPS status. You know, I've got a power supply and there's a little thing there that shows up whether it's charging or not. And I keep it on the far left, but it's good to check in on that once in a while. Yeah.

I think the last one I will mention is Rocket. This is an app that gives you Slack style emoji, which means you in Slack to do an emoji, you type a colon and then you

the name of the emoji, right? So like colon frowny face and it puts an emoji there. It basically puts that everywhere in the system. And so I mean, we run our company in Slack. I'm there all day, every day, it feels like. And so that has become an internalized thing for me. And so Rocket lets me have that anywhere. And you can also open it and like copy emoji out of it. You can save GIFs into it. It does a couple of different things, but it's really cool.

Yeah, I just don't do that stuff enough to justify it. I should. Yeah, that's fair. That one again. Yeah, it's fair. This episode of Mac Power Users is brought to you by Incogni. Data brokers are in the business of collecting personal information, which can be an uncomfortable thought for a lot of us. Nobody likes the idea of other people having access to our personal details.

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All right. You want to talk about Bartender? What happened? I think we should just because anytime we talk about mini bar stuff, this comes up and a lot of people didn't really follow along with it. And so I kind of, I kind of went through the, went through the internet the other evening, putting some notes together about this. So Bartender for years was done by an indie developer who,

And then a couple of years ago, back in, well, about a year ago, 2024, it was sold to a group named Applaus. It's like applause, but with two P's, like app. That's actually a pretty good name. I don't know much about this company. I don't know anybody there. Quoting from their website, quote,

They buy up applications and then they, quote, focus on expanding distribution with ASO, paid marketing, affiliate partnerships, cross-selling, and more. So they're a company that buys up apps and tries to make them more successful. Think of that what you will. Where this became newsworthy was that the sell was not disclosed at the time and people noticed it later.

Because there was an update in 2024 that added a couple of things, changed a couple of things about the app. So the certificates used to like show that the app was notarized and had gone through that process, those changed and changed.

Which would happen with a purchase. That would happen. Yes, and that's normal. But again, it wasn't disclosed that it had been purchased. And then, thanks to your friend Little Snitch, it was also discovered that the app had been updated with some software called Amplitude, which is a telemetry and...

sort of metrics package. Now, a lot of software has telemetry in it. So they know what systems their users are using, that sort of thing. These things, if they're any good, I don't know much about amplitude firsthand, but generally these tools are completely anonymized. So like the developer is not going to see, oh, there's a guy in Memphis with a 14 inch MacBook Pro. I bet that's Steven. Like it's sort of all kind of

washed of personal identity and put together and sort of aggregate data. But between the two things, people were like, what is going on with bartender? And, uh, it was, it was basically only after the uproar that, uh, Ben Sertiz, the original developer, uh, wrote a blog post saying, yes, Hey, I've been, you know, I've been using this for, I've been building this app for a long time. Uh,

But I sold it to his quote to take the app to new heights. And he got out. And I have no problem with that whatsoever. Happens all the time. Happens all the time. The hiccup here was, is that it wasn't, it wasn't disclosed to the users and users only found out about it after these other things were kind of discovered. And then about a week later, someone at app laws had a blog post also on the bartender site saying,

saying who we are, you know, that their focus was to ensure a smooth handover. And again, quote, we honestly just overlooked making a formal announcement. Believe that what you will. I don't know how you would forget to make a formal announcement that you bought a company, but I've never bought a company, so I don't know. And they pulled Amplitude out of the app. And, you know, the sale explains the certificate changes to notarization. But it spooked people, right? And I think...

To a degree, rightfully so. I'm personally, well, I don't love how it was handled. I think that what Ben and Applaus has said since makes a lot of sense. It got sold. It wasn't announced. That wasn't nefarious, I don't think. But, you know, they communicated after they realized that, you know, things had gotten out of hand. And the changes in the app make sense from that point of view. And so, yeah.

I think it's still fine to use. Like I said, I've been playing with vanilla, which is an alternative, uh, just leading up into this. And honestly, I still think bartender is the best option out there. Uh, but that, that's kind of the, the rundown of that. If you've, you know, Oh, you know, people were running around saying like bartender has been hacked or like all these things that ended up not being true at all, but it was, it was kind of a big deal there for a minute. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it was sloppy. I mean, they didn't tell us, and then they added something that was phoning home. Yeah. So it was a one-two punch. Obviously concerning. Yeah. And their explanation was the reason they put Amplitude in was to figure out the number of users with permission issues. Yeah. Yeah.

That actually kind of makes sense because there are so many permissions required with bartender because of what it does. I mean, all of it makes sense in hindsight, but they're, they did a poor job of it. In fact, the, the blog posts, uh,

The apology blog post is titled, let's try this again. So I think they acknowledge it. I think what they also underestimated is that Mac users feel very passionate about the apps they use and the developers they work with. And I can tell you that there are developers that I inherently trust. We talked earlier about that Cotypist app, which is an AI adaptive predictor.

but the guy who makes timing app is not going to be like selling it to Google. You know, it's just, I just believe that in my bones. Maybe I'm wrong, but he's not, you know? And like, so we, I, I felt that way about the bartender developer. I remember, you know, emailing him with him very early in his development as he was trying to get it off the ground. And like,

Like then all of a sudden he's not there and somebody else is there and they're adding stuff. And it really does get your, you know, get your, your spine up a bit. That being said, I thought when the whole thing was going down that people were overreacting and I,

And I never did believe it. So part of it was, I just didn't have time to go look for an alternative. And I thought this can't be that bad. And then once I read the explanation, I'm like, I kind of believe it. And the feature set in bartender is very useful because like one of the things bartender does is it gives you different sets of menu bar management tools. So like if I'm recording two different screencasts, like I'm doing a field guide and something for the labs, I can have different menu bar setups based on which one I'm working on, which is really handy. Um,

Um, the only alternative to that is having like three different, you know, menu bar apps and running different ones to do different things. And that gets nutty and I've already paid for it. So it's like, yeah, I already have a license. Now when they update it and want more money, then I'll probably look to see what's out there. But at least for now I'm okay with it. And I do accept their explanation. Um,

And I completely agree with everybody that they did a bad job of this. But I don't think it's as nefarious as everybody initially thought. No. No, I don't think so either. But I also see why people got worked up about it too. So yeah, that was the bartender situation. Yeah, exactly. And I don't think this justifies leaving them

If that's the only thing on your mind. But if you want alternatives, we're going to list a couple in the show notes. Steven is using Vanilla Pro. There's one called Hidden Bar. And Tim Hardwick wrote an article over at Mac Rumors with some other alternatives. So we'll put all that in the show notes so you can go look at the other options. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of good options. And basically this takes...

you know, some of some or all of your menu bar items and puts them behind a single button. And it's great if you have a MacBook with a notch or you just want to tidy your look. And they, you know, they all kind of have their own take on that, on that feature. Okay. So that's our menu bars. If you've got some cool ones on your menu bar, why don't you go to talk.macpowerusers.com

You can go to the forum and, and there's a, there is a thread for this show. Share your menu bar apps. Maybe we'll include it in the future feedback episode. Love to hear what you guys are doing with it. We are the Mac power users. You can find us at relay.fm slash MPU. Go there for feedback and membership into more power users. The ad free extended version of the show.

Thank you to our sponsors today, 1Password, Ecamm, Google Gemini, and Incogni. For you more power user supporters, stick around. We're going to be talking about Apple's new hardware, and we'll see you next week.