Bartender Pro

If Apple wants to ship a MacBook and call it Ultra and aim it at pro’s pros, the least it can do is just add a quarter inch of bezel and do away with the notch. I know Jason Snell and the Get Used to It chorus of Apple bloggers said I’d just get used to it, but it remains a nuisance six years in and turning it into some mock Dynamic Island isn’t the fix I’m looking for.

How are people feeling about Applause Group so far? There was a lot of consternation when they bought Bartender and Strongbox, with people assuming it was the beginning of those apps being enshittified, but so far I haven't seen any sign of them messing it up, and not being a megalithic tech corporation I'm more willing to believe (but still skeptical) that they actually want the apps to remain good.

Bartender 6 has been very buggy since Tahoe's launch. I was pretty annoyed to see them announce a subscription-based "Bartender Pro" when I was already a paying customer of the poorly-functioning base product.

As a result, I've moved from Bartender to Thaw, which is open source. It took me all of 5 minutes to install it via brew and get it configured to my liking. I have had zero problems with it.

I moved away from Bartender after the sale, don't imagine I'll move back to it. I'm especially not paying a subscription for it.

As far as I can tell, this doesn't add anything I'd actually want anyway other than "actually works correctly".

@Billyok It's very easy to get rid of the notch:

Settings > Displays > Show All Resolutions

Select the variant of your current resolution that's slightly shorter. Your visible screen will now start just below the notch.

@Drew That tip just improved my life.

When I tried Bartended 6 months ago it was very buggy, maybe fixed by now but who knows. I'll keep using v5 which works just fine for me on Sequoia and does everything I need and more. And I'm not downgrading to Liquid Ass so definitely don't need and don't want any app "Tahoe Upgrades". Bartended Pro subscription? Yeah no.

Notch should disappear like the touch bar i wouldn’t build an app feature around it..it might. There are better apps that solve these problems and i’m not talking bout tink or toink or whatever it’s called

I switched away from Bartender as soon as they went subscription-only. Ice.app is free and has been working fine: https://icemenubar.app/

@Ian To be clear, Bartender is not subscription-only. The longstanding non-pro features do not require a subscription.

Since Tahoe, I’ve found that all of the apps on this category, including Bartender 6, Ice/Thaw, SaneBar, etc. end up grabbing the cursor spontaneously to try and move menu items around. Has anyone else found that to be the case, or is there something I’m missing?

> plus Top Shelf

So the stuff available in probably dozens of different open-source or free programs like Notchy, Boring Notch, OpenNotch, ComfyNotch, NotchBox, Itchy, Droppy, and countless others. That's not going to convince me to pay for a subscription; making it fast and stable and improving menubar icon management might, though.

> the least it can do is just add a quarter inch of bezel and do away with the notch

I don't understand why that would even be necessary. The front camera on many phones seems small enough to fit inside the actual screen bezel, which is almost 7mm tall at the top of the screen. There are also under-display cameras that have gotten really good in recent years.

I don't get how the garbage camera in MacBook Pros needs a notch at all, and whatever other sensors they put in there are useless to me.

> end up grabbing the cursor spontaneously

I've noticed that in Barbee, which I've used for a bit when Bartender stopped working reliably.

Now I'm using Thaw; it seems to be the fastest, most reliable option.

Well holy smokes, look at that. Thank you @Drew, I never knew this and just assumed a fix like this didn't exist.

@Plume I both agree with you and assume there must be a reason all those smart engineers can't give us a hole punch camera on Macs by now. But it is irritating that the phone's superior front-facing camera has a shrinking footprint while this one has remained ungainly large despite the menu bar being far more important than a phone's status bar.

I use Ice and it's pretty great. One of my favorite things is it'll make the center of your menu bar transparent but the edges (with menus and other items) filled. It's a cool look

Bartender's new dynamic Island features look very cool but there's no way I'm paying a $15/year subscription for it

Of note: Applause Group respected the old Mega Supporter licenses. I didn’t have to pay anything extra for the Pro features.
Kudos!

>I’ve found that all of the apps on this category, including Bartender 6, Ice/Thaw, SaneBar, etc. end up grabbing the cursor spontaneously to try and move menu items around.

I haven't seen this with Ice or Thaw. (I moved from Ice to Thaw as it seemed, at the time, to handle Tahoe-specific quirks better.)

>There are also under-display cameras that have gotten really good in recent years.

Yes, but now you're swapping one compromise (an indent of the screen) for another (worse camera optics).

> the phone's superior front-facing camera

Keep in mind a phone is much thicker than a laptop lid. A phone front-facing camera is ~7mm deep; a MacBook camera ~2mm.

"Yes, but now you're swapping one compromise (an indent of the screen) for another (worse camera optics)."

The under-display camera on my Android phone is far better than the webcam in my MacBook Pro.

Are they using private APIs to implement Airdrop as a drag and drop target?