Shuttle is an excellent little Mac app for those who frequently use SSH to connect to remote or local servers. It’s functionality is very simple: you gain a little SSH menu bar item that pulls down to give you super-quick access to whichever servers you have configured. Selecting one of the servers immediately launches terminal … Read More
Mac OS X includes a few system-level menu bar items that are incredibly useful, but if you’ve ever wanted to have a few extras to your menu bar consider these four essentials. All free, they’ll bring a wide variety of function to the menu bar, where you’ll be able to quickly see the weather, make … Read More
There are plenty of ways to prevent sleep, whether it’s the caffeinate command, the Caffeine menubar item, pmset, or hot corners, but each of those is all encompassing, meaning being active prevents sleep regardless of what is running. If you’ve ever thought it’d be nice to selectively prevent sleep based on specific applications instead, that’s … Read More
Emoji icons are a lot of fun and special characters can be extremely useful, but the standard way of opening the character viewer panel isn’t the smoothest in the world. Fortunately, OS X has an excellent bundled menu bar option that can be enabled to allow for extremely fast Emoji and character access, letting you … Read More
If you spend a lot of time switching between web browsers for development or for whatever other reason, you’ll find Switch useful. Switch is a handy free menu bar utility that transfers all browser tabs and windows between web browsers in Mac OS X. Whether you use Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, you can easily send … Read More
On some fresh OS X installations, you’ll find the user name or login appears in the upper right corner of the menu bar, even if there is only one user account on the Mac. This is actually a feature called Fast User Switching, and the name likely appears in the menu bar due to the … Read More
If your Mac menu bar is starting to resemble an icon farm, remember that you can remove items from the menu bar by holding down the Command key and dragging items out of the menu. The icon will disappear into a puff of dust, the same way an icon from the Dock or sidebar disappear.
FreeSpaceTab is a free utility that lets you manage hard disks and mounted volumes directly from the Mac OS X menu bar. With an attractive and simple GUI, you can pull the menu down to see all mounted drives and partitions, arranged by volume type (local drives, disk images, network volumes, etc) as well as … Read More
One of my longstanding peeves with Mac OS X is the lack of a pull-down calendar in the menubars default Date & Time settings. If you click on the time, instead of seeing something useful like a calendar or more date/time details, you just have options to set an analog clock or open Preferences. I’ll … Read More
If you don’t want to deal with manually hiding and showing the desktop icons, showing hidden files, accessing the user library directory, and forcibly emptying the Trash, grab DesktopUtility for your menu bar. It’s a free and simple app that offers those four useful features directly in the menu bar, preventing you from using any … Read More
We showed you how to display the CPU temperature in your Mac OS X menu bar, but what about showing the real temperature outdoors? A little free app called Meteorologist does just that, sitting in your menubar and giving you weather updates on the locations you specify. Meteorologist puts a tracked locations temperature along with … Read More
If you want to keep an eye on your Mac’s CPU temperature, you can choose between two different apps to display the temperature right in your menu bar. If you’re running Mac OS X 10.6.8 or lower, both apps are free, but if you’re on Lion then you’ll have to pay for one of the … Read More
Do you need your computers IP address often? If so, IPMenulet is likely the quickest way to have the number handy all the time, it’s a free and simple menu item that displays your current external IP address in the Mac OS X menu bar, there’s no other frills or features.
You can display and monitor virtually all essential system activity directly from your Mac OS X menu bar using a great utility called iStat Menu:
You can retrieve extended wireless connectivity data and details from anywhere within Mac OS X by using a nifty trick that toggles the Wi-Fi menu bar item to display additional specifics about any wireless router. To do this, hold down the Option key and then click on the WiFi menu icon found on the Mac.
Tired of the lengthy digital clock showing in the Mac OS X menu bar? You can go for a minimalist approach by setting the clock to display as an analog (that is, the old fashioned clocks with a face and hands), which will take up much less space and helps to clean up an otherwise … Read More
Distracted by your menu bar? If you want a stylish iOS-like black menu bar in Mac OS X but don’t want to go all out with an iOS / Mac desktop, you should grab Nocturne, it’s free and adds some pizazz to your Mac desktop. Nocturne actually serves several other purposes intended to make the … Read More
If you’ve ever wondered how much battery life is remaining on a MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air, you should set the battery icon in the OS X status bar to display some additional details, like the percentage remaining. This gives you an immediate idea of how much longer you can use a Mac.
