![]() ![]() It proves the old adage that the best way to learn something is to teach it. It’s still pretty cool in Bartender 3 and I have to confess that I never noticed it was there in all the years I’ve been using Bartender. In the older version when you trigger the search, you get a tiny search box under the Bartender icon and as you type the menu bar icons start disappearing leaving only the ones that match the search string left. In Bartender 3, you could do a search of your existing menu bar items, and you can define a hotkey to trigger it, but it’s not quite as cool as it is in Bartender 4. With Bartender 4, that problem is solved by the addition of Quick Search. With half hidden by Bartender, I sometimes can’t remember if I’ve purposely hidden the one I’m looking for or not, so I toggle back and forth trying to find the one I need. As a result, it’s not uncommon for me to scan methodically through them all trying to find the one I with which I want to interact. Quick Search Bartender 4 Quick Searchīecause I load up so many apps on my Mac, I have a ton of menu bar items. I think this makes it easier to get full situational awareness of your menu bar items. In Preferences, there’s a check box to use the Bartender Bar to show hidden items, and that means that if you click on the Bartender icon or in the empty space of your Mac’s menu bar, the second Bartender Bar will show up under where you clicked, without removing your normally-showing menu bar items. Maybe having your primary menu bar disappear and be replaced by the second one is annoying and you’d rather see both at the same time. If you try the hover method and find that Bartender gets triggered through accidental movement up there too often for your tastes, you can add a specific time delay before activating so it’s not flipping to the second menu bar except when you hover with intention. You can set Bartender to allow you to simply hover your mouse in the empty area to activate the second menu bar. ![]() Maybe clicking is too much work for you to do. It’s so much easier now to activate that second menu bar. Bartender 4 General TabĪssuming that you’ve put some items on a second menu bar using Bartender 4, you can click in the empty space of your menu bar and the second menu bar will appear. Ben calls that second menu bar the Bartender Bar, but I always think of it as the second menu bar. In Bartender 4, you have new ways to show the second bar, and you get to control how this happens. Showing and Hiding Second Menu BarĪs I mentioned, the purpose of Bartender is to manage your menu bar items by hiding the ones you never want to see, and putting the ones you sometimes need to see on a second menu bar. I actually paid the full $15 because it is such a mission-critical app for me and I hadn’t paid the developer, Ben Surtees, in years, and I wanted to support such an awesome app. Once it is released, it costs a grand total of $15, and if you have a previous version you can get it on upgrade pricing for $7.50. Bartender 4 is in public beta right now, which means it’s free to download and use to give feedback to the developer until it is officially released. If you want to learn how to use Bartender 4, of course I highly recommend signing up for ScreenCastsOnline, but I did want to tell you about Bartender 4 here to get you excited. I recently created a tutorial on ScreenCastsOnline about Bartender 4 using my backup Mac which is already on Big Sur, and I really missed Bartender 4 when I went back to Catalina on the production machine. I’m just fixing to make a plan to nuke and pave my production machine so I can go to Big Sur and I have to say Bartender 4 is a big reason on why I’m excited to do it. When I say “for Big Sur” I really mean that it only runs on Big Sur, not on Catalina or earlier. It’s been a huge favorite in the Mac community for ages, and it’s just getting a huge update for Big Sur. ![]() If you haven’t heard about it before, Bartender is an app that allows you to control what you see in your menu bar by creating essentially a second, hidden menu bar. Whether it’s because you have a small screen or because you’re a menu bar app addict, if you have too many menu bar apps to fit on your menu bar, then you need Bartender from. ![]()
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