Something that a number of Mac bloggers have been doing recently is sharing what they have up in their menubars, and so I thought that I might as well share mine as well. So, without further ado, here is mine:

From left to right (I’ve linked to reviews where applicable):
CoverSutra - Really nice iTunes controller that I love.
Quicksilver - Without a doubt, the swiss army knife of Mac OS X.
Skitch - One heck of an application for snapping, annotating, and sharing images.
iClip - That nice thing for keeping a clipboard history.
Twitterrific - The driving force behind my addiction to Twitter.
Wakoopa Tracker - Sitting there, quietly monitoring what apps I’m using.
TextExpander - If I forget a snippet or want to quickly add a new one, the menu item is there to help me.
International - Quick access to the Special Characters palette.
AirPort - Because I’ve got to know when I can go wireless.
Clock - The small version because it’s good enough, saves menu bar space, and because I wear a watch all the time anyway.
Battery - How much juice do I have? Am I getting thirsty?
Spotlight - It’s slow and I really don’t use it. I know there’s a way to scrap it, I’ve done it before, but I’m just too lazy to mess around with my precious system in that way.

I realize that my blog has been slumping–apparently I haven’t done a non-review article in a week! I’ll be catching up soon, I hope…

Tags: Mac, menubar, Personal, services, Software

One of the most overblown software/hardware categories these days are iTunes controllers: there’s thousands of them. I’ve already reviewed my favorite, but thought that I’d give mention to another one that I’ve tried.

Like I said, there’s a whole bunch of iTunes controllers out there, but one of the founding members of the iTunes Controller category was Synergy, which puts three little controls in your menubar for controlling iTunes, and also includes a number of other nice and interesting features. The downside to it though: it costs money. However, there’s another app out there which is fairly similar, called ByteController.

ByteController is actually fairly similar to Synergy: its main function, like Synergy, is to put the same previous/play-pause/next buttons into the menubar. It’s also skinnable, and comes with a number of skins which you can choose from to determine how the buttons appear in the menubar. Another Synergy feature here, it also lets you set hotkeys for controlling your iTunes from your keyboard, and ByteController includes Growl support. But what it doesn’t borrow from Synergy is its price tag: ByteController is 100% freeware.

All-in-all, ByteController works as advertised and pretty well, although I wish that it had an option to disable Growl notifications, as I’ve already got a few other things that gives me Growl notifications for my music. I ended up ditching it when I got the more powerful (but more costly) CoverSutra, but for someone looking for a free, simple way to control their iTunes experience from afar, ByteController is a very economical way to go.

Final Rating:

Tags: iTunes, Mac, menubar, music, review, Software, Synergy