It’s been a while since I’ve gone off on a rant, but I couldn’t hold this one in any longer because it’s driving me absolutely freakin’ crazy! What the hell is with the OSX menubar? Why does it suck so badly?

I have a host of apps that I use on a regular basis, and they offer menubar apps/icons to make it easier to work with. The problem is, the damn things are ugly, and I can’t configure the order in which they appear. Adding to my frustration is the fact that the load order appears to change on a whim every time I log-in or restart. Thus, my menubar madness rant…

I used to be able to move them around holding down the Command key and dragging the icons, but that ability got removed long ago. Now only Apple-provided menubar apps like Time Machine, Bluetooth, Volume, etc can do it. 3rd party menubar apps are just screwed. OSX’s Dock allows me to add icons for my favorite apps, move them around in the Dock in the order I want them, and I can paste custom icons on the app, file or folder itself so it’s easily identifiable to me in the Dock. So why the heck doesn’t the menubar offer the same flexibility?

OS X Menubar

In the screenshot above (sorry it’s so small), most (not all) of the apps I have displayed in the menubar are loaded in no particular order. Some of those menubar items I use more often than others. Some I really don’t use at all, but I’m forced to have the icon displayed up there or the service doesn’t work, such as StuffIt Deluxe’s MagicMenu. Why the hell can’t I move them around? It can’t be that hard to allow us to do that, can it Apple? In fact, we know it isn’t because they allow it for their menubar apps. What gives???

Now I know I could quit them all, then launch them in the order I want them to appear. But then I would have to do this every time I restart the computer or log-in (which I admit, I don’t do that often). Stupid!

As far as the ugliness goes. I guess I could spend several hours digging through the individual app’s package file for the icons, draw my own, then replace them. But that’s a pain. I really would like them all to be black – to match Apple’s icons. Some apps give you the option, such as DropBox, of using a color or Leopard-style black icon, but they’re in the minority. It should be a rule that all icons that go in the menubar are all the same size, and all offer a black only option. Ok, end of silly rant!