What really frustrates me is how many apps that are useful in the menu bar do not have monochrome icons.<p>Cisco's anyconnect is a super bright icon. Tunnelblick is either yellow or the icon looks super washed out and does not work with retina displays. Dropbox defaults to a colorful icon (why!?)
Shameless plug: I made a silly little Mac menu bar app called Satellite Eyes that automatically changes your desktop image to the satellite/map view from overhead your current location. I just pushed out a version that supports retina quality tiles, where available.<p><a href="http://satelliteeyes.tomtaylor.co.uk" rel="nofollow">http://satelliteeyes.tomtaylor.co.uk</a>
The content on the site seems rather old?<p>Anyway best app to manage the menubar is imho <a href="http://www.macbartender.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.macbartender.com/</a> and well worth the price.
Besides the usual suspects, such as Dropbox, TextExpander, Fantastical; I have "The Clock"[1] which shows me time of cities I added. The Clock allows me to slide the timer to see what time will it be anywhere in the world against another clock or my local clock. Other utilities such as Spectable[2], 1Password[3] Helper stays totally hidden and is nowhere to be seen even in the menubar.<p>All of the above menubar apps are managed by Bartender[4], which allows me to show/hide, hide in bar but show in bartender or totally hide it.<p>1. <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-clock-the-best-world-clock/id488764545?mt=12" rel="nofollow">https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-clock-the-best-world-clo...</a><p>2. <a href="http://spectacleapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://spectacleapp.com/</a><p>3. <a href="https://agilebits.com/onepassword" rel="nofollow">https://agilebits.com/onepassword</a><p>4. <a href="http://www.macbartender.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.macbartender.com/</a>
I love iStat as a replacement for system controls: the clock, battery and seeing stats for cpu, temperature, network.<p><a href="http://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/" rel="nofollow">http://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/</a>
The Mac used to plop down icons of the extensions it was loading as it booted. Does anyone remember the "vanity icon" extension that you could put a lot of other cool looking icons into, and it would plop those icons down, delaying between each, as it booted?
The worst part about the menubar itself is that you can't set it to be black without an add-on.<p>Modifying dock icons isn't hard, but it shouldn't be necessary.<p>My menubar: Flux, Gmail, Twitter, Temperature, Network, Time.
Really good concept, I have already found some useful productivity apps. Maybe we could throw similar approaches for sharing general configuration tips on HN.