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skp574

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 16, 2005
280
0
greenwich.london.uk
I been playing with apps that put icons on the Menu Bar and seem to have a large collection! Can I change the order in which they appear and is there away to hide them ala Win XP! :rolleyes:

Is there anyway I can add some colour to the standard ones, such as battery life, volume, ichat and Airport signal?
 
skp574 said:
I been playing with apps that put icons on the Menu Bar and seem to have a large collection! Can I change the order in which they appear and is there away to hide them ala Win XP! :rolleyes:

You can re-order them by holding the apple key and dragging them around. If you drag them off the bar, they will go away (and can be reactivated from system preferences). I don't know of a way to temporarily hide them, like XP does. But hopefully you won't have quite so many, since in OS X there are only *useful* ones. ;)
 
mkrishnan said:
You can re-order them by holding the apple key and dragging them around. If you drag them off the bar, they will go away (and can be reactivated from system preferences). I don't know of a way to temporarily hide them, like XP does. But hopefully you won't have quite so many, since in OS X there are only *useful* ones. ;)

Thanx for the tip on dragging icons around, at least I can get them into an order I like.
 
Glad to help. :) I don't know about the second part. I seem to remember hearing that the menu icons are all located in .png files that can be accessed somewhere on the system, and modified. There might be a thread buried here on MR about this.
 
I can't get any of the non apple ones to drag. The apples ones work fine but for the other ones when I command click it just looks like I normally clicked :confused:
 
killuminati said:
I can't get any of the non apple ones to drag. The apples ones work fine but for the other ones when I command click it just looks like I normally clicked :confused:

to re-arrange the non apple ones you will basically have to quit the app and have them open in the order you want to see them, right to left, so the app you want on the right, you will have to open first, if you have them set to auto open then you will have to re-order them in your user account settings
 
killuminati said:
I can't get any of the non apple ones to drag. The apples ones work fine but for the other ones when I command click it just looks like I normally clicked :confused:
The non-Apple Menu Bar items aren't actually "real" Menu Bar items, they are handled differently than regular ones, since they are a kind of "hack". Apple never released the official documentation on how to make a "real" Menu Bar item, so if you ever see a non-Apple item that is handleable like any other Apple one, then it is probably a product of reverse-engineering, which as far as I know, is kind of illegal. That's why often in small screens or in apps with many menus, the hacks end up drawing themselves on top of those menus, because they are told only to sick in there, not to interact with other things in the Menu Bar.

Oh, and, BTW, you can find info on colorizing the Menu Bar icons on this article. Hope that helps.

[edit: there are plenty of pre-made Menu bar icons and other cool stuff that you can download here]
 
Thanks for the help guys, It's kind of a pain to have to do that though. I wonder why apple never released the documentation???
 
killuminati said:
Thanks for the help guys, It's kind of a pain to have to do that though. I wonder why apple never released the documentation???

Probably because they didn't want every company to load an icon up there like they did in Windows.

Lee Tom
 
LeeTom said:
Probably because they didn't want every company to load an icon up there like they did in Windows.

Lee Tom

It's probably a good thing. It looks very cluttered in windows when someone has 50 programs down there
 
LeeTom said:
Probably because they didn't want every company to load an icon up there like they did in Windows.

Lee Tom

exactly, and i think this makes the people who do make apps for the toolbar make them look all the better as a result, like Adium and Meteorologist
 
PlaceofDis said:
exactly, and i think this makes the people who do make apps for the toolbar make them look all the better as a result, like Adium and Meteorologist

Yeah...I think the problem in Windows is not so much the fact that third party companies *can* make tray widgets, but that all of them feel compelled to *do* so, despite the fact that half of them don't even do anything, and they feel compelled to use run-in-background utilities when they aren't necessary....

If you discount all the widgets that are there because windows programs run background tasks, and you take into account the fact that the equivalent Mac programs mostly do not run background tasks (I think I have two...one for iCal and one for iTunes, which IIRC is a relatively new thing), then Windows doesn't have many more functional ones than Panther does. :D So you get the option to hide all the ones which are useless...which makes you wonder.....
 
Some of them are useful, some aren't.

Hate to say it, but the iTunes one does absolutely nothing - however they have an awesome iTunes daskbar dock thing that makes up for it!

You can disable some of them in Windows XP.

Edit: Here is a pic
 
The big difference between the Windows Task Bar and the Mac OS Menu Bar is that in a Mac you always have the chance to make the item dissappear without affecting any background task, so it won't be cluttered if you don't want it to be, but in Windows if you remove the icon from the Task Bar, it will make the application quit, finishing any process that that application is performing, even connecting to the internet. That's just one more advantage of the rest of us, we don't depend on a bar on the lower-right corner of the screen ;)
 
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