The IT Nerd

Yesterday, I brought you the story of the gong show surrounding the Mac app Bartender. The TL:DR goes something like this. The app who was being written by a guy named Ben Surtees was quietly sold a couple of months ago to a company named Applause who appears to buy apps and finds new and creative ways of monetizing them. It was then discovered that the most up to date version of Bartender has a ton of analytic gathering code in it. That made me and a lot of other people instantly uninstall it. And the responses to this controversy that have been given by Applause have been shifty at best. But the question is what do you replace it with?

Well, I’ve been experimenting with a piece of software called Ice that does some of what Bartender used to do. The key word is some because one thing that Bartender was really good at is automatically making menubar icons that needed attention appear. For example, making the WiFi icon appear if you disconnect from WiFi. Ice doesn’t do that. But what it does is allow you to configure the menubar so that the items that need to always be visible, and less used items are hidden. Let me illustrate that:

What you see here is the stuff that I absolutely care about seeing 100% of the time. Besides iStat Menus which tells me all the stats related to how my Mac is performing, I want to see the WiFi icon, Battery status, Spotlight, Control Center, Siri, and the date and time. You’ll also note that next to the WiFi icon is a VPN connection. It’s there because while typing this article, I was connected to a client’s network to quickly fix something for the client in question. I want to draw your attention to the right of the Spotlight icon. You’ll see a circle which is Ice. Click it and you get this:

Now I get the the stuff that I don’t care about 90% of the time. Starting with Clyde, the G Hub app that controls the key light for my camera, Amphetamine which keeps my Mac awake during things like Power Point presentations, Garmin Connect which I use to upload new maps to my bike computer, Monitor Control which I use to control the brightness of my external display, and Time Machine. If I click on that circle again or just wait a bit, all these items disappear.

Like I said, this isn’t perfect. But it’s free (the developer does take donations) and the developer seems to have a good reputation. So I’m giving this a shot for now. But I’ll be trying a few other options to see if I can find anything better. If I come across anything that’s better, I’ll write an article on it and let you know.

This entry was posted on June 6, 2024 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.