Bartender Mac Menu Bar Item Control Review

Everybody who works on a Mac knows about this problem: You have many icons in your menu bar and as soon as your current program’s menu gets somewhat long, you can’t see all of those icons anymore. Following Murphy’s law, the icon you are looking for is no longer visible.

The problem becomes more imminent with small displays, e.g. when you work on a 13″ MacBook Pro without external display. Usually you have to find an application which only has a few menus and hope that you can access the necessary program icon.

That is where Bartender comes into play, which is not available at Mac’s AppStore but can be downloaded and licensed on the website for $15.

Bartender, Mac Menu Bar Item Control

Bartender adds a second menu bar right below the regular one which you can place manually wherever you want. This second menu bar is the container for all icons you do not want to show up in your Mac’s menu bar. Each single icon can be individually configured. For each icon you can decide if you want to leave it as is, move it to Bartender’s menu bar and whether it should show up in the regular menu bar for a few seconds on change. This means, that e.g. the Dropbox icon will show up when the Dropbox sync is in progress. Afterwards, the icon will vanish into the Bartender bar once again.

Example

Here is an example how my configuration looks like. As you can see, I have some status stuff and commonly used programs in the menu bar and all programs which I want to have access to but are not that important for me are located in Bartender’s menu bar.