I am super excited to announce that with this release Bartender 4 has finished its public beta and is released today.
This does not mean I am stopping working on Bartender 4, anything but! As I still have many exciting features I want to add.
This means Bartender 4 has now been thoroughly tested by all you great users (thank you!) and I am confident it works as expected on all the many different user setups.
If you have not yet purchased a license, your 4 week trial of Bartender 4 will start now.
Bartender 4 is Bartenders’ biggest update yet; with support for macOS Big Sur and Apple M1, it also boasts a load of new features and updates to its core abilities making it the best version yet.
Bartender gives you total control over your menu bar items (the icons at the right of your menu bar). It lets you hide any menu bar items you want but still quickly access them in a variety of ways, such as revealing your hidden menu bar items instantly when you mouse over the menu bar, or in its Bartender Bar beneath the menu bar, this is great if you have lots of menu bar items that wouldn’t fit easily in the menu bar itself. Speaking of lots of menu bar items, Bartender 4 also lets you reduce the amount of space between the menu bar items, allowing your space for more.
macOS Big Sur increased the menu bar item spacing, which looks nice; however, it reduces the usable space. Bartender makes this configurable, with spacing the same as in previous macOS versions or even no spacing so that you can fit in all your menu bar apps.
Bartender 4 also introduced menu bar spacers. These allow you to add spacers between groups of menu bar items that can either be just a configurable space, text, or even emoji, great for grouping menu bar items into similar groups.
Bartender also brings a host of ways to improve your interaction with menu bar items with new triggers for showing menu bar items when they need your attention. Such as image comparisons, which shows a menu bar item when it matches a particular state, or even via a script such as showing items when on a VPN or when your Airpods are connected. It also has some excellent built-in triggers such as showing Battery when on battery power or showing Timemachine when backing up.
Bartenders’ search ability has dramatically improved. It now has a Spotlight-like interface with fuzzy search to very quickly find, show and activate any of your menu bar items, all from your keyboard. Speaking of keyboards, Bartender now also lets you assign hotkeys to any menu bar item. When this hotkey is activated, the menu bar item shows and activates. So you can have super convenient hotkeys for any menu bar item, even if it’s not ordinarily available.
Bartender 4 also introduces a new preferences screen to quickly and intuitively organize and order all your menu bar items, even choosing where new menu bar items are placed.
Bartender 4 has many more improvements, refinements, and new features that make it a brilliant update worth checking out.