MacOS is preferred for its fluidity and seamlessness. Of course, solid hardware and fire-breathing silicon add to its appeal, but the software experience developed by Apple focuses on convenience and security more than anything.
In its quest to do so, however, Apple has often ignored glaring functional holes in the OS. The lack of a native clipboard is one such as miss, one that is addressed by excellent third-party apps such as Maccy. The Menu Bar is another similar tale of missed opportunities.
See that line at the top of the screen, filled with icons on the right side and core system control text on the left? Yeah, the Menu Bar. Apple hasn’t done much with it in the past few years, despite several third-party utilities doing an excellent job while living as a menu bar tool.
I prefer menu bar apps because they are easier to access, don’t clutter the screen estate, and are fairly lenient on the system resources. Apple hasn’t done a stellar job at optimizing the in-house apps as Menu Bar utilities, but there are plenty of apps out there that get the best out of it.
Hide Icons
My Mac desktop is a mess. And no matter how frequently I clean it, I end up with a fresh batch of images, screenshots, and file packages on the home screen every single week. I keep some of them intact for quick access to necessary files, but that comes with its own dilemma: Privacy.
I often use the screen sharing feature in Google Meet and Zoom video calls. And each time, I’ve had to scramble with window resizing to cover things up in the desktop background. It’s untidy, and there’s always a privacy scare attached to the whole exercise.
Likewise, for my assignments, I often have to do weird cropping or make post-capture edits, because the screenshots have the desktop items peeking from the sides. My editor recently shamed me after spotting an unhealthy number of files and emails on my home screen.
Thankfully, Hide Icons does the job perfectly for screen capture and live video presentations. The app lives in the Menu Bar and hides all the items on the screen with a simple right click. Going the extra mile, you can pick your own wallpaper color instead of showing the one you’ve set on your Mac’s home screen.
You can specify this behaviour for only the active screen, or all the screens if you’re working across a multi-monitor setup. You can even set a periodic reminder to hide the items on your desktop, which is a thoughtful touch. The best part? It’s free, and doesn’t pester you with ads, either.
Download Hide Icons from the App Store.
TimeCraft
By far, one of my favorite macOS menu bar, this one is tailor-made for folks who appreciate goal-based workflow. TimeCraft lets you set daily work targets in the form of cards so that you can keep an eye on tasks that need your attention.
You can set names, pick a color identifier for each one, and then start a timer as soon as you jump into the task at hand. Once again, this app lives entirely in the menu bar, and all the core controls are just a click away.
Once you enable a task and get into work mode, the app shows a neat timer at the top of the screen, revealing the progress you’ve made on the current activity. The design is neat, and the app respects your light / dark mode UI preferences, as well.
Now, you might wonder whether this strategy works? Well, it certainly keeps me disciplined. As far as scientific research goes, a paper published in the PLOS One journal notes that “time management impacts wellbeing—and in particular life satisfaction—to a greater extent than performance.”
Download TimeCraft from Github
Hidden Bar
Of course, installing a lot of menu bar utilities comes with its own set of hassles. As you can see in the image below (left), my menu bar is brimming with app icons, both native and third-party. And that’s not even the full set, as I’ve got a lot more that were inactive at the moment.
Plus, with the wide boat-shaped notch, you get even less screen real estate to accommodate menu bar utilities. In a nutshell, things get crowded as you discover and add more Menu Bar tools that come in handy on a daily basis.
Hidden Bar offers some needed respite, and in an extremely convenient fashion. This free app hides all the icons behind a slide-out menu. You can hide or reveal the icons manually, using either a left click, or even assign a keyboard shortcut for it.
Additionally, you can set an auto-hide behavior for the menu bar icons at intervals of 5/10/15/30 seconds, and one minute. You can choose to activate it automatically at system log-in, and customize which apps you want to keep in view permanently using a simple drag-and-drop gesture.
Download Hidden Bar from the App Store.
Shutdown Scheduler
Look, Macs are fast, and the near-instant screen-on experience is something you must experience firsthand. It took Windows years of experiments to finally achieve the instant-on laptop experience, riding atop the Windows on Arm platform. That begs the question: If your Mac is blazing fast, why bother with shutting it down?
Well, there’s a lot of debate about the perceived benefits of shutting down your computing machine every once in a while. It’s the frequency, however, that makes a tangible difference. Here’s what the experts at CleanMyMac say:
“Restarting your Mac is the number one tip on any troubleshooting list. Shut Down mode can help fix many Mac issues; plus, it will also flush your RAM and allow your device to cool down, protecting it from overheating.”
Like me, if you forget to shut down your Mac for prolonged spells, or even put it to sleep mode, there’s a neat app that can offer some respite. Shutdown Scheduler is a free utility that lets you set timers for shutdown as well as sleep mode separately.
It also shows the countdown behavior, so you can keep an eye on the timing and make adjustments, if necessary. The app also comes with a command log viewer facility, and you can execute it with admin privileges, as well.
Download Shutdown Scheduler from GitHub.
