Safari, Firefox and Mail all have quite a lot of menu items, especially since I added the Debug menu in Safari. I looked at the application with the most menu bar items and cut down all the icons on my menu bar, so they will not overlap this specific app. In my case, this happened to be Firefox, which cuts me down considerably more than, for instance, Chrome does.

So I looked at some solutions to cut down on the clutter up there, while still retaining all of the functionality.  This was what I got.

1. Hide Menu Bar Items

Hiding menu bar items can seem trivial, but there are lots of apps you don’t really interact with and they don’t share any statuses, so why do you need to see them in the menu bar? You may want to use them all the time but not close them down.  So this makes some apps a great candidate for hiding. On my system, I hid ScrollReverser and a myriad of other background apps I want always on, such as Alfred, QuickSilver, TotalFinder and others.

Just right click the icon, or click it if that brings up the contextual menu, then find the option to hide it. Sometimes, this may be in the application’s preferences instead. Just find this for each application you want to hide. It may seem tedious, but at the end, you’ll find a lot of space cleared, which you can enjoy or use for applications that do demand interaction.

2. Remove The Spotlight Icon

This may seem drastic, but like I said, no functionality is ever lost. If you don’t need this, you can also turn it off, but for those that do need it, remove the icon by entering this in the Terminal if you’re on Leopard:

sudo chmod 0 /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app

If you’re on Snow Leopard, you can use this:

sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search

Then enter this to see the changes:

killall SystemUIServer

So how do we replace this functionality? Well, apps like Alfred and QuickSilver can replace it if you want, and are much better than Spotlight, but if you want exactly the same functionality as Spotlight and don’t mind paying, Launchbar (€24 / $35) is very popular for going way beyond Spotlight, but also has an integrated Spotlight function. Don’t turn off Spotlight if you want to use this though, just hide the icon.

3. GeekTool

One thing that takes up a lot of space is the clock. Clear this and you could fit several more apps in there. I have found one way to do this. Just download the free GeekTool app and open it in System Preferences. Now drag a shell to the desktop and where it says, “Command” enter this:

date '+%A, %B %d, %Y, %I:%M:%S %p'

Set it to refresh every 1 second. You can remove the :%S and set it to refresh every 60 seconds to get a minute clock, which is less processor-intensive.

This will create a Geeklet on your desktop that tells the time and date. Hide the menu bar clock, and pin the Dock to the left of the screen, using this Terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start

To return to the middle or pin to the right, replace start with middle and end, respectively. An alternative way is to use a Dashboard widget to tell the time.

One disadvantage to the GeekTool approach is that when watching movies full-screen, you cannot put your mouse to the top to check the time. But if you have a Mac laptop sold at or after October 2008, there’s a simple solution. Just swipe upwards with four fingers to see the GeekTool shell on the desktop. Otherwise, you can set up a screen corner to activate Exposé.

For more on GeekTool, check out Jeffry’s brilliant article.

4. SlimBatteryMonitor

What can be said about the default Apple battery indicator? Well, it takes up a lot of space, especially when it’s “calculating” the time remaining to run out of juice. To remedy this, just download and install the free tool, SlimBatteryMonitor. Set the icon shape to horizontal in the preferences and that’s it. Now, remove the default battery indicator by dragging it off the menu bar. You now have a much smaller battery indicator.

We’ve covered this before.

AppleDisplayScaleFactor

This is a rather volatile solution, but if you want to use it, you can make all text in the OS smaller, including the application menu bars, using this Terminal command:

defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.9

This will make all text 90% of normal size.

Changes will take effect on all apps launched after the command issued. Restart Finder by typing in:

killall Finder

Or you can Force Quit it, by bringing up the Force Quit window, using ?+?+esc. Now just click Finder and click Relaunch.

You cannot arrange Desktop icons in View Options if you decide to use this method. The icons on the far right will go even more to the right, until they are hidden.

Conclusion

Now that you’re done, fill up that empty space with these menulets.

Has this finally helped you with all those out-of-control menu bar items? Have you found that you don’t use a lot of the items and quit them? Do you have any other solutions? What apps are you adding in the menu bar, now you have the space? We appreciate any comments below.

Well, there’s a way out. The coders at iThink Software also got annoyed with Apple Preferences and decided to write MenuPrefs in order to make it more manageable. Now, instead of click after click, you can now access all of your favourite Apple Preference Panes via the Menu Bar. Finally, there’s now a quick way to access your sound preferences, turn Growl on and off and change your energy saving settings. It’s all just there.

What Does MenuPrefs Do?

MenuPrefs is a simple application which runs in the Menu Bar system wide, allowing access to your Apple System Preferences. Users can choose which preference panes to list in MenuPrefs and re-arrange the order of the list. This means that sysadmins can limit the preferences list to just what’s available for users to change. Other users might limit it to just their most regularly-used preferences.

Get MenuPrefs

MenuPrefs is free and available from the iThink Software website. They’ve made public a serial number for use with the older version while they work on making an entirely freeware product ready for use.

Registration Name: MenuPrefs Freeware User
Serial Number: MP200ST001-E4E4-81NH-JF5C-DW26-G5HC

Installation is about as easy as it gets: just open the DMG and drag the application to the Applications folder. Then when you start it, enter the Freeware license given.

The MenuPrefs icon is now in your MenuBar and is ready to use.

Modifying MenuPrefs

When you start using MenuPrefs you’ll soon see that the list of preferences is rather long. There’s also a “Show All” item to take you to the regular System Preferences pane.

To make changes to your MenuPrefs list, choose the “Preferences” option at the bottom of the list.

The preferences let you choose to open MenuPrefs on startup, which is handy if you want to keep using it. You can also choose whether to show icons in the menu and how big those icons should be.

The list order can be changed to Name order, Location order, Category Order or Custom Order. Location order separates the list similarly to within System Preferences.

Custom order should let you choose which preferences to show in the list, including separators and a custom order. It’s a little buggy for me though and won’t make the changes.

More About Mac Preferences

If you’re keen on tweaking your system, you’ll probably also want to read about these preference changes you can make to your Mac:

• 15 System Preferences Items A New Mac User Should Adjust
• Expand Mac’s Dictionary App by Adding Additional Languages
• Tweak Mac Leopard’s Hidden Settings With xMod
• 15 More System Preferences Items A New Mac User Should Know About

So, is MenuPrefs something you’ve really wanted for a while? Is there anything the developer can do to improve the app? Let us know in the comments!

I have, however, found a solution – Xmenu. This decidedly un-Mac-like app adds menu icons to the upper right hand corner of the Mac menu bar. Let’s have a look at why this app has won me over.

Quick & Easy Access

One beef I have with Finder is ease of access. To maximize usable screen space on my Mac, I keep my dock hidden. If I want to open Finder I either need to go to the dock to open it, which involves mousing over it so it appears, or I need to Command-Tab and then select Finder.

Xmenu, however, adds icons to the upper right hand part of the menu bar. These icons can display a number of folders including the Applications, Developer, Home and Documents folders. Once an icon is added, you simply need to click on it to open a display of the folder’s contents. This is readily accessible so long as your menu bar is visible (and it almost always is).

This may seem like a minor complaint to resolve, but I’m sure some users share my desire to remain on-task at times. Xmenu is extremely quick, and doesn’t require that I open a new window over whatever I’m working on. For this, it has my love.

Custom Folders & Snippets

As mentioned, Xmenu comes with a number of default folder options. Xmenu will display everything that is in those folders. This can also become a bit unwieldy in certain situations, as you may have a lot of apps or documents that can be displayed. I know that I do.

Fortunately, Xmenu has a solution to this. There is a user-defined folder, and the contents of it can be changed by adding files to the Library/Application Support/Xmenu folder. Adding files to this folder can provide you with a smaller selection of choices more closely related to the project you’re working on at the moment.

Another cool features is the Snippets option. You can add files to Snippets by placing them into the Library/Application Support/XSnippets folder. As with the user-defined Xmenu folder, doing this will add the files to the appropriate Xmenu icon. However, clicking a Snippet doesn’t open the contents. Instead, the contents of the file are automatically copy-and-pasted into your currently open application. Snippets is very much like the copy-and-paste function, but you can store multiple bits of content in the XSnippets folder and paste them whenever you’d like.

Conclusion

Xmenu won’t be for everyone. While I don’t like Finder much, I recognize that it is user-friendly in many ways. While quick, Xmenu isn’t as attractive or simple. It displays a large list of information from certain folders, and you have to do the rest.

Do you have a favorite application that runs round Finder? Be sure to let us know in the comments. I enjoy Xmenu, but I’d also like to check out other alternatives.

During the years of my interactions with computers, I’ve found and tried countless applications of various magnitudes; from the huge apps that can do everything to the small ones built to do only one thing. Here are several small and useful Mac utilities that you might not know even existed.

What’s Keeping Me?

Mounting and unmounting drives/volumes are a fact of everyday life for Mac users. So are deleting files and emptying Trash. But those actions don’t always go smoothly. Sometimes there are unknown things that prevent the process from being completed.

You’ll get a pop-up notification window every time a volume can’t be ejected.

Or whenever one or more files can’t be deleted from the Trash.

But the system doesn’t always tell you why. The most common reason is because there are some opened files inside the Volume/Trash. You can do a search from within What’s Keeping Me Mac utility to identify the application which prevents you from accomplishing your task. You can then quit, relaunch, or kill the problem application and continue with the unmounting/deleting process.

You can also install the automator workflow so that you can do the search directly from Finder. To use it, just right click on the file and choose “Service – WhatsKeepingMe Search“.

Volumizer

There’s another Mac utility that also deals with mounted volumes called Volumizer. This app is a Preference Pane add-on which provides a system-wide menu that displays all mounted volumes: hard drives, flash drives, optical discs, network volumes, disk images and other mountable items in the Finder.

Volumizer will list down every mounted volume and give you a quick unmount (eject) option if you hover your mouse over the volume name.

If a physical drive has multiple volumes (partitions), choosing Eject for any of the volumes will unmount all of them immediately. The app will also skip Finder’s eject volume confirmation window. So be a little careful not to accidentally unmount volumes that you still need.

But of course, you can’t unmount the startup disk.

Space Control

It’s amazing how ‘normal’ activities that people do on their computer – downloading movies, managing photos, installing application suites – can fill up the hard drive in no time. If you are one of these ‘normal’ people, you’ll need a Mac utility to constantly monitor the space usage of your hard drive.

Meet SpaceControl. This app will sit in your menu bar and clicking on it will show you the remaining free space on your startup volume. You can also see the sum of these numbers, which is the total free space available on all volumes.

For your convenience, you can set the app to send you a notification email whenever the remaining free space goes below a certain number.

MiniUsage

While Space Control specializes only in hard drive space data, Mini Usage tells you everything that you want to know about your system. The app will show a small menu-bar display of your chosen system performance data: CPU usage (the percentage of your Mac’s processing power that’s currently in use), incoming and outgoing network data rate, and remaining battery juice on your MacBook.

You can also make MiniUsage alternate among all of these statistics every few seconds (1 – 5 seconds) and how often the statistics are updated.

I’m sure that there are other small, useful, but not too well known Mac utilities out there, something like Pauser and BashFlash. If you are familiar with one or more of them, why don’t you share the love with others using the comments below?

This is a problem which two applications, Droplr and CloudApp, seek to solve. Both of these Mac-only apps try to make sharing files a simple drag-and-drop process. Simply find a file on your computer, drag it over an icon, and waa-la! The file is uploaded and a short URL is made which can be posted on social networks. However, since both Mac file sharing apps serve the same function, you only really need one. So, which is the best?

Ease of Use and Interface

As you might expect from Mac-only apps, both Droplr and CloudApp do their best to maintain a clean, minimalist design and interface. Both have very similar websites with obvious download options (CloudApp even copies the “Buy Now” button design from the Apple website). Once you install the apps you will find a simple icon in the upper right hand corner. Droplr’s icon sort of looks like a teardrop, while CloudApp’s icon quite obviously looks like a cloud. The idea is that when you want to upload a file you simply drag-and-drop the file onto the icon and it is automatically uploaded to your Droplr or CloudApp account.

However, both Droplr and CloudApp make some notable mistakes when it comes to ease of use. Both use a web interface for browsing, sorting, viewing and deleting your files. Droplr’s web interface is completely baffling at first glance. There is no text at all – just some icons. After a minute or two, you’ll figure out that the icons are a way of sorting different types of files, but would it really hurt to add a tiny label to each icon?

CloudApp’s web interface is much more clear and robust. The different sections of the interface are labeled and intuitive. The categories in the CloudApp interface are also more defined. For example, text, video and audio files are lumped into the same category in Droplr, but CloudApp places them in their own respective categories, making uploads easier to find.

But as I indicated earlier, CloudApp isn’t perfect. CloudApp apparently uses a system of extensions, which are called Raindrops. That’s great, except that CloudApp gives you no clue about what they do. None. I could find no documentation about them on the CloudApp help website.

Functionality

At a basic level, the functionality of both Droplr and CloudApp is the same. You drag-and-drop files onto the icon and your file is uploaded. Simple enough.

There are, however, some major differences. For example, Droplr is very tightly integrated with Twitter. In fact, you’ll use your Twitter account to log in to Droplr. Whenever you drag and drop a file to Droplr you can click a small Twitter icon which appears. This takes you to your Twitter page and lets you instantly create a tweet containing whatever you just uploaded.

Another neat feature of Droplr is the ability to upload text messages, called notes. These notes are directly uploaded like any other file but can be viewed in a web browser. If you have something very simple you want to share – perhaps directions to a bar or a recipe for cookies – putting the information in a note is quicker and easier than putting the information into a text document and then uploading the text document.

CloudApp, on the other hand, makes it easier to share screenshots from your computer. If you have CloudApp installed any screenshot you take will instantly be uploaded to your CloudApp account. This includes both full-screen shots and shots which are targeted on a specific part of the screen. Droplr, on the other hand, requires that you use a specific, separate shortcut for Droplr screenshots.

Verdict

Both Droplr ad CloudApp have their benefits and disadvantages. Ideally, the benefits of both could be combined into one application. For now, however, you’ll have to choose.

Ultimately, I throw my hat into CloudApp’s ring. What sways me in favor of CloudApp is that Droplr showed an unfortunate tendency to crash. I three times ran into situations where Droplr would act as if it was uploading a file and then become stuck just when it should finish. When this happened Droplr would become non-functional and I had to Force Quit the program. That is very annoying for a program which is supposed to make file sharing easy.

Still, it won’t hurt you to try both mac file sharing programs out, and if you really want the ability to post things straight to Twitter you may find Droplr to be the superior app.

Which do you favor? Let us know in the comments.

The sharing habit doesn’t stop at the real world. File sharing is a common internet activity among web users. There are already many file sharing services out there, but most of them intentionally make the process difficult – at least for free users. Using file sharing services usually means web-only file uploads and hellish file downloads.

But every cloud has a silver lining. I’ve come across a cloud file sharing service called CloudApp that makes the whole process a snap.

Go Into The Clouds for File Sharing

There are two parts to the cloud file sharing service: the web version (accessible from all platforms) and the desktop version (Mac only app). Before you can use the service, you must register first via the web interface.

After activating the account – by clicking the confirmation link inside the “Activation Instruction” email, you will land inside your account – the web version.

There are two tools available here: a URL shortening tool and a file uploading tool. But if you are a Mac user, you would want to directly click on the “Tools” link to download the desktop app and plugins.

After all the downloads have finished, you are ready to install CloudApp – the desktop app.

Accessing The Cloud From The Desktop.

The desktop app comes in compressed Zip format. You can unzip it anywhere you want, and run it from there. But if it’s not inside the Applications folder, it will ask you whether you want to move it to the place where all apps go.

CloudApp resides silently in the menu bar, ready for action. So, why don’t you start by checking out the “Getting Started” guide to get yourself familiar with the service.

Or, you could skip the introduction and go to “Preferences“.

The “General” preferences tab deals with the global hotkey to summon the app, options to activate Growl and the sound, an option to replace clipboard items with uploaded file links, and whether you want to start CloudApp at log in.

The “Account” tab deals with your login data. Fill it with the email address and password that you used when you sign up.

Next is the “Raindrops” tab. Raindrops is the term used by CloudApp to describe plugins. Their function is to enhance the functionality of the CloudApp desktop app to be able to work with various Mac applications. There are already several Raindrops on the list, but you can add more by downloading the available items from the CloudApp site.

There is also an “Updates” tab where you can customize the way you want CloudApp to be updated.

And the “Support” tab is where you can get more information about this service, submit bug reports and also request more features.

More Droplets Beyond The Cloud

As mentioned above, you can add more functionalities to CloudApp by adding Raindrops. The process itself is pretty straightforward: you just unzip the downloaded Raindrops and open the extracted files by selecting them and use the keyboard shortcut “Command + O“. Those files will be automatically added to CloudApp.

However, you must restart CloudApp to activate the newly added Raindrops.

Armed with CloudApp (desktop version), you can share files easily by dragging and dropping them onto the CloudApp menubar icon.

The files will be uploaded to their cloud storage,

And the links of the files location will be added to the clipboard. You can paste the links to email and send them to your friends.

But for those without a Mac machine, you still can use CloudApp by accessing the service via the browser and use the web-based uploading tool.

To me, CloudApp is a must-have. It might not be as rich-featured as Dropbox, but CloudApp doesn’t clutter my hard drive and provides a quicker way to file sharing.

Have you tried cloud file sharing? Do you use CloudApp or know of other alternatives? Share using the comment below.

Image credit: Tipiro