Organize your menu bar apps
Wow! Its been a crazy week for Bartender. We have been featured on many sites and blogs all around the world!! It turns out South Korea have a real issue with busy menu bars, and we are “big in Japan!”.
Hundreds of feedback emails have been reviewed, and are still flying in every hour. Fantastic to hear all your thoughts so keep them coming, have your say in making Bartender the best it can be! Read on for what we are working on currently:
We are working hard fixing a few app compatibility issues we have; this includes Clusters displaying twice, and other apps not working correctly when the menu bar item is removed and added back. This turned out to be quite a big change so we are carefully testing it lots before we release. The Clusters issue we have fixed for the next version.
Theres been reports of Bartender requiring high performance graphics on MacBook Pro’s that have dual graphics cards. This was due to some OpenGL drawing we did. We hope to have removed all need for OpenGL solving that issue.
We are looking into 1Password Helper as we really love 1Password and want this working! Same goes for LogMeIn.
A popular request is for Bartender Bar to automatically hide! This is trickier than it seems, as the apps in the bar can take focus (this is when a menu would normally hide) but it doesnt look good when using an item in the bar if it hides. As always, we will strive for the perfect solution. Watch this space!
System items and third party Menu Extra’s, these can already be hidden and arranged by holding down CMD and dragging, but users are wanting these in the Bartender Bar. Technically these are very different to Menu Bar Apps so we need to investigate further to see if we can add these to Bartenders Bar. We are looking into it.
Updates currently display for 5 seconds. In our internal build we have the time it displays selectable per app. We are also going to have this autoextend as updates come through, so a item that is continually updating shouldnt flash on and off. You will see this in an update soon!
We want to make the Bartender Bar match your menu bar style, as in transparency etc. We are also going to look into theming. Any suggestions or icon designs are welcome!
We have been looking into a bug that prevents apps from working till they are restarted or OS X is restarted. This is turning out to be difficult to fix without the restart. We are deciding if we should just bite the bullet and require the restart or suggest a restart when Bartender is installed? What do you think? Your feedback would be good on this.
There are still some crashes occurring which we are working to fix, and bugs we squish as we find.
Hope this gives you an idea of what we are currently looking into. Thanks again for all your thoughts!
BTW, Ben will be at the much anticipated WWDC 2012!! …so look out for him!
