Bartender for Mac

Softonic review

Manage your unruly menu bar icons

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 make OS X’s menu bar icons manageable.

We have been working extremely hard to polish up Bartender after releasing 1.0. In this version a lot of effort has been put into stabilizing everything and preventing rare issues. Notification Center UI bug In the previous version, if you: Showed the Bartender Bar. Displayed Notification Centre. Closed the Bartender Bar and reopened it. A visual bug appeared that all contained items did not shift with the Bartender Bar frame; this is now fixed. Very rarely some users would have icons missing in the Bartender Bar, this should be fixed, we have not seen this issue here, so please do send feedback if you see this. Again a very small number of users have reported slowing down of their system after extended periods. We have made many improvements to memory usage and performance to prevent this. OSX has a bug that would cause some apps controlled by Bartender to crash, this was a very rare issue but an unacceptable one. We have worked around the OSX bug and after a restart the issue should be gone.

Changes

• We have been working extremely hard to polish up Bartender after releasing 1.0. In this version a lot of effort has been put into stabilizing everything and preventing rare issues. Notification Center UI bug In the previous version, if you: Showed the Bartender Bar. Displayed Notification Centre. Closed the Bartender Bar and reopened it. A visual bug appeared that all contained items did not shift with the Bartender Bar frame; this is now fixed. Very rarely some users would have icons missing in the Bartender Bar, this should be fixed, we have not seen this issue here, so please do send feedback if you see this. Again a very small number of users have reported slowing down of their system after extended periods. We have made many improvements to memory usage and performance to prevent this. OSX has a bug that would cause some apps controlled by Bartender to crash, this was a very rare issue but an unacceptable one. We have worked around the OSX bug and after a restart the issue should be gone.