Six Bartender Alternatives to Manage Your Mac's Menu Bar

[yayarod]

Another update which I hope is helpful:

1. I sent two e-mails to Bartender and got two responses today. The second e-mail I sent was in respect of their Privacy Policy which is can be found at Bartender 5 - Privacy Policy . It is short, simple and straightforward. The information from the Audio & Screen permissions is never sent anywhere.

2. In support that they do not collect the information from the Audio & Screen permissions I can confirm the only Little Snitch activity I have had in respect of Bartender is as noted in above post when it checked for updates, nothing since.

I am also comforted that they answered both of my questions within 1 day and directly.

I will be sticking with Bartender as its functionality / triggers meet my needs and based on Little Snitch I am satisfied that it is not sending the screen recordings anywhere.

Comments / thoughts are encouraged and welcomed.

Thanks for your reports.
As I stated on an earlier comment, all this bla, bla, bla regarding Bartender's privacy concerns was absolutely ridiculous.

 

[HouseofG]

This discussion has caused me to go back to Bartender. Thanks!

 

[JoelBC]

This discussion has caused me to go back to Bartender. Thanks!

Happy to have been able to assist.

 

[tosbsas]

This discussion has caused me to go back to Bartender. Thanks!

me too

 

[Ledgem]

Would be interested in the comments and thoughts of others.

Thank you.

Just a very general comment - I have a few ways of monitoring my entire network (even beyond my Mac) and some devices send telemetry data seemingly once a month or less. Monitoring for one day or even one week and not seeing activity doesn't mean that it isn't being collected and possibly sent.

This isn't to say that Bartender is or isn't collecting and sending anything - it's just a very general comment.

Thanks for your reports.
As I stated on an earlier comment, all this bla, bla, bla regarding Bartender's privacy concerns was absolutely ridiculous.

We live in a world where users have become products, and your personal information is sold for both legal and illegal activities. As the saying goes, "it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you" - and they are, indeed, out to get you. The concerns were and are not ridiculous in the slightest.

I'll just pre-empt the other response to that, which is "well I don't care if they have my information, I have nothing of importance/nothing to hide" - that's great, but doesn't invalidate anything. Some of us do have confidential information that we are responsible for maintaining secrecy over, while others care just purely on principle.

 

[jagooch]

What I liked about Bartender is the splitting of the menu bar. Now I haven't disabled it but I am very concerned as well about the privacy of this app.
I am using Little Snitch so I blocked any connections from the app for the time being, I just hope this actually is safe enough.

Which version of Little Snitch did / do you have? I might do the same thing!

 

[JoelBC]

I have been using (or, more accurately, trying to use) Bartender 6.1.0 and am very frustrated in that:

1. The triggers which worked flawlessly up to Bartender Version 5.4.0 a) do not work and b) result in the keyboard and the mouse becoming unusable.

2. The support has gone from great (getting in responses in a matter of days) to non-existent. I wrote support about this problem over 6 weeks ago and have not gotten a single response.

I am looking for a new menu bar manager and would like recommendations for other menu manager managers that have Bartender like triggers which can be used to display hidden icons when the "menu bar icon changes" because the application becomes active (i.e., I have the Carbon Copy Cloner menu bar icon as a hidden icon in Bartender but used a trigger to display the icon when Carbon Copy Cloner was making a backup as its icon changed so that I would know a backup was being made).

I looked at ICE which looks good but does not have a trigger like capabilities (at least that I could see from looking at the website or looking at GitHub).

Would appreciate recommendations.

Thank you.

 

[oric1]

JoelBC, you may want to take a look at Barbee. I am not using triggers so I am a little ignorant regarding those, but Barbee has Shortcuts and Automation that may be useful to you. And Barbee is totally stable here, as it seems they have resolved issues that appeared with Tahoe.

As you did, I also tried Bartender 6.1.0 a few days ago, and it is a little better than previous versions. But it is still not usable on a regular basis. Some items are still not properly indexed, like Adobe Creative Cloud which is named item-0. Several items are still moved around after every restart. I'll wait for the next version.

 

[JoelBC]

@oric1 , appreciated, I will take a look.

I have read positive things about Barbee other than the fact that the developer is Chinese and teh concerns that go with that. Comments / thoughts on this?