Bartender for Mac

Bartender is a clever application for Mac that helps you tame your unruly menu bar icons. There are many apps on the Mac that come bundled with a menu bar icon that acts as a heads up display for notifications. Popular apps like Dropbox, Alfred, Growl, and Adium all come with menu bar icons but they can quickly take over your entire menu bar! Bartender solves this problem by moving your menu bar icons into the Bartender app.

Bartender is extremely flexible. You can tell it to always show an icon, only show it when there's an update, or hide it all together (if that's not an option within the app itself). This makes the OS X menu bar act much like Window's system tray.

In use, Bartender worked well for taming most of our icons but a few applications didn't play nicely and didn't show up in the Bartender app at all. This is disconcerting and hopefully the developers will fix this issue.

You can set custom keyboard shortcuts to bring up Bartender for quick access. You can also drag Bartender's tray across the menu bar to place where you like.

Overall, Bartender is a great tweak that makes OS X's menu bar icons manageable.