Bartender Pro
Bartender Pro includes everything in Bartender 6, plus Top Shelf and future Pro tools as they’re released.
[…]
[Top Shelf is a] powerful new way to interact with your MacBook’s notch — bringing common utilities into what used to be wasted space.
The Pro features require a new $15/year subscription.
Top Shelf is part Dynamic Island, part clipboard manager, part file utility. Frankly, much of it also feels like the kind of feature Apple should building itself, because my experience over the last year or two with the notch in the MacBook displays continually makes me annoyed at just how user-unfriendly it is.
To trigger Top Shelf, you bring the cursor up to the notch; the interface expands outward from there, just like the Dynamic Island on the iPhone. By default, the first screen contains a pair of customizable widgets for common features like Calendar, Weather, and Music.
[…]
Files allows you to temporarily store, yes, files that you might want to move between apps. Drag and drop a file in there and then you can drag it back out of Top Shelf into another app. That pane also has an AirDrop section; drop a file there, and it will trigger the system’s AirDrop feature, with the file already pre-populated.
The Files feature sounds like Yoink.
See also: MacRumors and Mac Power Users Talk.
However, there are also some truly remarkable [Apple] oversights which are somehow allowed to persist from macOS generation to macOS generation. […] menu items can end up being hidden behind the MacBook Pro notch, with Apple seemingly unaware or unconcerned about this. I typically only have four or five third-party menu bar items on screen at any given point (albeit including a wider timezone clock one), and yet it is still very common for one of them to end up invisible.
Previously:
- Bartender 6
- The MacBook Pro Notch
- Mac Menu Bar Icons and the Notch
- Bartender Acquired by Applause Group
- Bartender and the Notch
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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".
