Ever plug your laptop into an LCD projector and have to switch to a much lower resolution than you’re used to? Do you use a lot of menubar apps? Have a hard time seeing all those menubar apps when you’re using a lower resolution display setting? If so, today’s tip is for you.
AccessMenuBarApps is a free utility that allows users to hide the application menu in order to see the menu bar apps. The way it works is simple. Running the app places ANOTHER menu bar app in the upper right side of the screen; it looks like a yin yang symbol. Clicking the symbol will hide the menus from the currently running app in favor of the menubar apps themselves. This may not seem like a big deal, until you run something like Keynote, an app with many menus, on a smaller screen at a lower resolution. Then, even the AccessMenuBarApps menu bar app is hidden. Happily, the default behavior is to have the mouse trigger the hiding effect (along with a charming-at-first-but-ultimately-annoying sound) when the cursor is scrolled up to the top of the screen, and then scrolled some more. Or you can use the Shift-Spacebar to activate this as well.
No more needing to launch System Preferences to mess with screen resolutions during a presentation, right? A nice secondary feature is that the AccessMenuBarApps dock icon is itself a clock. Handy!
Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he’ll really appreciate it.
3 responses to “Find and Use Those Crowded Out Menubar Apps [OS X Tips]”
Your article shows that such problem is not a problem of few mac users but a lot of them I think. One day ago I shared my concept according to same topic. I called it Bar-box which could be an app that stores other menu bar apps inside. As for now, my friend who is OS X developer is trying hard to make that project a real. More details here: drbl.in/dscB
Is there any way to get rid of that annoying sound?
you can switch off the sound effects (door knocking and squeezing) in the preferences window.
If you mean the low sound coming with the “puffs” you have to switch off the visual effects.