Menu Bar Trouble

[eah2119]

First off, I have a 13 inch MacBook Pro and the resolution is set to the highest it can go, 1280 x 800. My Menu Bar is basically crammed with stuff. Starting from the top right I have Spotlight, the date/time, airport, the bluetooth icon, the volume icon, Time Machine and from there I have 3rd party applications. These include a battery monitor, CPU monitor, memory monitor, network monitor, fan speed and temperature monitor, disk activity monitor, Caffeine, and the Dropbox icon. When I'm in Finder, Safari and many other applications, the menu items for that application can fit fine. But when I'm in iTunes my last menu icon, Dropbox, disappears. When I'm in Amadeous Pro (audio editing) Dropbox, Caffeine, disk activity monitor, and fan speed and temperature monitor disappears.

It's not such a problem for me, but I can see how it can be for some people. Is there a workaround for this? I think this is a big flaw in Mac OS X. Does anybody else agree?

 

[rprebel]

That happened to me on my old monitor, but since I got a 1920x1080 the problem magically went away.

You have to decide what's more important to you, and maybe remove some of those menubar items you don't really need. For me, the first thing to go was Spotlight.

 

[spinnerlys]

What kind of flaw is it then?

The other way would be to have all of the icons visible, but some of the menu items of the foreground application invisible.
1280 x 800 is not really a big resolution for that many menu bar extras and icons you have there. Either cut down some of them or make them appear simpler or use other methods (widgets - iStat Pro) to display some information.

 

[eah2119]

Well, Windows doesn't have this problem. On the right of the task bar or superbar in Windows you can show or hide certain icons. Couldn't this be added into Mac OS X? Maybe if you click on an icon it will drop down a second menu bar with the hidden icons. IDK. I just thought it was weird that this was left out.