Opinion: Forget the Dock, Master The Menu Bar

I’ve never got on very well with the Dock, the app launcher Apple puts at the bottom of the screen. It does very little that I find useful, and many things that simply bug me. Thank goodness for the Command+Option+D shortcut that hides it out of the way. That’s where my Dock spends most of its life out of my sight.

That said, there are still some aspects of daily computing life that need to be kept close to hand. Things that I want access to, at a moment’s notice, no matter what app I’m using. And things I want to use, briefly, without leaving that app.

And that’s why I spend a lot of time investigating and trying out various Menu Bar widgets and applications. The Menu Bar is the mini dock at the top right of the screen where the system clock lives, plus other customizable widgets called Menu Bar apps.

My goal has always been to get the greatest utility from the smallest number of Menu Bar apps – because of course, Menu Bar space is limited.

Consequently I’m very, very fussy about what apps get to stay there.

The current line-up looks like this, from left to right:

XMenu, ByteController, I Love Stars, Anxiety, Jumpcut, Time Machine, iChat, MenuMeters, Airport, Volume, Battery, Bluetooth, clock, Fast User Switching, and Spotlight.

Read on for a guided tour of some of the third party extras in that list.

ByteController is one of many Menu Bar controllers for iTunes. I’ve tried most of them and found it the least intrusive. You can set a bunch of keyboard shortcuts with it, to make iTunes even easier to reach, but I tend to use it without them. The only thing it won’t let you do is manage song ratings, which explains the next widget: I Love Stars.

This lovely little app displays each song’s rating as it appears, and lets you set the rating with a click. I find it incredibly useful when I set iTunes on to all songs shuffle. Every unrated song gets rated that way, because I can see at a glance what the current rating is. I don’t need to jump to a different app, or a different Space, or bring up the Dashboard it’s just there, in front of my eyes, right where I need it.

Anxiety is also a fairly recent addition to the Bar, mainly because my todo list has only recently shifted from a plain text file to iCal. Not that I’d dream of opening iCal to add a new item – Anxiety is a much better way of adding, viewing and removing todos. If only I could see them on my iPhone, too. There’s a thought, eh Apple?

Last but not least: Jumpcut, a longstanding resident in the Menu Bar and probably the most essential utility of the lot. Yes, there are other clipboard snippet managers. Yes, some of them might have many more features. But (as I believe I’ve said before elsewhere), I prefer this one because I think it lives in the right place, and operates exactly the way a clipboard snippet manager should.

I make use of the Menu Bar so often, for so many reasons, that I have come to treasure it. I even like the fact that it eschews the eye-candy displayed by the Dock: I like things kept simple. (You can imagine how I felt when I saw those first views of the new Leopard desktop, with Steve Jobs showing off the new transparent Menu Bar and smiling about it. I was horrified.)

It’s like tending a garden. I choose the apps that live in my Menu Bar with a great deal of care, and weed out anything that doesn’t deserve some of those hard-to-come-by pixels.

And, just as in the old days I used to wonder what other people kept on their Docks, these days I’m much more interested to see what’s lurking at the top of their screens.

Let us know in the comments.