Since time is short today, I’ll get to the “gloss over” post on the Menu Bar stuff. Here I’ve darkened out the third-party menu items and left those that are from Apple easily seen. From left to right, you have .Mac Sync, AppleScripts, Spaces, System Volume, and Spotlight.

.Mac Sync keeps pretty much everything in sync between my MacBook Pro and Mac Pro. Sometimes one will wipe out the others address book or something silly but that’s why I back up nightly with SuperDuper, too. For most of my purposes, .Mac Sync works but I’d love to see more remote disk space and a little better robust services for weeding out systems and preventing them from stepping on each other.

AppleScripts menu item gives me easy access to my scripts which is nice. I guess I could disable the menu item and just use Quicksilver, but when you have a 30 inch screen, who cares.

Speaking of that 30 inch screen, I really don’t know why I have Spaces on my Menu Bar. I really don’t use it. I guess I figure if it’s there, I’ll end up using it. I never really got into virtual desktops not even back in my X-Windows days on top of SunOS. I’ve tried using it even on my MacBook Pro, but old habits die hard. Maybe someday I’ll use it.

System volume is self explained. It raises and lowers your volume. I keep it up on my Menu Bar so if my music doesn’t play and iTunes is all the way up, I can quickly look at the Menu Bar and see, “Aah, it’s muted!” Sure, I can figure that out by just pressing my volume key on my keyboard, but hey, I’m visual. I’m a guy.

Last, but not least, I use Spotlight. I never really used it until Leopard. With all its added features and neat tricks like performing mathematics (try putting this in: pi/-4), I use it all day long. It finds files fast and has even shown me some things on my hard drive I forgot about! Hopefully Apple will put advanced features in a future release, but for now, I’m happy with it.

So, there’s the gloss over stuff. I’ll be talking about my other menu items in the coming week, so stay tuned!

2 Responses to “What’s on Your Menu Bar Part II: The Default Stuff”

1. Mark Says:
   May 17th, 2008 at 11:09

   If you happen to find an analog clock for the menubar that is easier to read than Apple’s please not this.

   And if you know of any apps that work like ‘taskmenubar” did, can you mention them? I miss taskmenubar. One of the best classic shareware apps ever written.

2. Partners in Grime Says:
   May 17th, 2008 at 16:24

   About the only thing I use Spaces in the menu bar is to glance and see which space number I’m in.

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