![\"My](\"http:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/mymenubar.png\")
<\/p>\nI like to make a clean start from time to time. When you make a clean start you soon realise what applications you actually need and use and what’s just wasting space on your system. I decided to use the arrival of Leopard as an excuse for a long over-due clean start. A few weeks have now passed so it would seem like a good time to take stock and see what applications I’ve actually re-installed. It would take me for ever to write about all the apps I’ve installed so instead I’m just going to talk about a sub-set of the most visible of all apps, menubar apps. It should be noted that all the items in my menubar are either a part of OS X or free.<\/p>\n
[tags]Apple, OS X, Menubar apps[\/tags]<\/p>\n
The simplest thing to do is to start with a screen shot of my menubar and simply go through each of the icons.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Starting from right to left you can see the new and more dull Leopard Spotlight icon. I don’t think you can actually get rid of it but I wouldn’t want to even if I could. Spotlight has improved so much in Leopard that I just couldn’t do without it anymore. I even use it as an application launcher in favour of my once beloved Namely<\/a>.<\/p>\n Next you can see that I have Fast User Switching enabled and set to display the full name of the account currently active. If you share your Mac with other people this is a fantastic feature. It lets you keep all your windows and programs open while someone else uses your machine with a different account. Next to that we have some more standard OS X components, the time, volume, airport status, and bluetooth status. The date and time and volume components can’t be removed but the Airport and Bluetooth ones can. I like to keep them in the memubar so that I can keep them switched off at all times unless I need them. I don’t like my Mac talking wirelessly to anything unless I really need it to.<\/p>\n Next you can see that I use rogue Amoeba’s Sound Source<\/a>, then two menus from iStat Menus<\/a>, one to keep an eye on my CPU temperature, and one to show my current bandwidth use.<\/p>\n Then we come to two more standard OS X components. First the Spaces menu which I hardly ever use to actually switch Spaces, but which is handy for seeing what Space I’m in. If you’re wondering I almost always switch Spaces using the keyboard shortcuts. Then we come to the iSync icon. I use .Mac to keep all my Macs in sync and I like to know when my machines are syncing.<\/p>\n Finally we come to two more great third party menubar apps, the first is Caffeine<\/a> which is great for preventing your machine from entering sleep mode when you don’t want it to. Lastly, we come to Teleport<\/a>. This is a fantastic application which I use to share the keyboard and mouse of my Mac Mini with my MacBook Pro while working in my study at home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I like to make a clean start from time to time. When you make a clean start you soon realise what applications you actually need and use and what’s just wasting space on your system. I decided to use the arrival of Leopard as an excuse for a long over-due clean start. A few weeks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[26,139,188],"series":[],"class_list":["post-593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers-tech","tag-os-x","tag-review","tag-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7t9xK-9z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7509,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593\/revisions\/7509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bartbusschots.ie\/s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}