The Menubar Mac Apps I Use Every Day

As a follow up to my rundown of native Mac apps I use every day, here’s a look at the menubar Mac apps that live on my MacBook Pro. I have some of the system apps you’d expect to see (Spotlight, Battery, Clock, Volume, Network, Bluetooth, and Time Machine), but I get the most out of these third-party apps.

Dropbox »

You might be saying, “well, duh!”, but I think nerds take Dropbox for granted. A quick survey of my office, for example, would find most of my colleagues without Dropbox installed on their machine, with the exception of those people who I’ve gotten to install it for one reason or another. Between Dropbox and Evernote, I have pretty much every document, graphics file, ebook, and more backed up to the cloud.

The thing I love about Dropbox is the ability to access 30 days’ worth of previous versions of each file. This has saved me on more than one occasion as I’ve accidentally written over a graphic design file of some kind or another. It’s also seamless — unlike Time Machine, which runs at certain intervals or when I instruct it to run, Dropbox kicks into gear as soon as changes are made to its folder on my machine.

It’s unclear what will happen to Dropbox’s utility as Apple’s iCloud service comes online this fall, but I believe the overlap between the services will be small. Power users will continue to love the flexibility and granular control that Dropbox provides. I think the service is safe… for now. Of course, who knows what Apple will announce in the next iteration of iCloud?

MenuWeather »

MenuWeather is a great little utility which simply presents the current temperature in your menubar. Clicking on the temperature provides you with more detailed information about the current conditions, a 5-day forecast, and links to hour-by-hour listings, a 10-day forecast, and the radar map. You can provide MenuWeather with a primary location (city, state or zip) to track, or it can find your location based on your IP address. The location finder is only fairly accurate (based on where I live), but I’ve had more success with it when I’m out on the road.

CalendarBar »

I use CalendarBar to preview a listing of all of my Google Calendar, iCal, and Facebook events. It supports Growl for notifications, which is really handy when I’m at work and prefer not to have my Google Calendar open in the browser or notifications running on my iPhone. Unlike Fantastical, another great calendar app for the menubar, CalendarBar offers read-only functionality. You’ll need to open base versions of these apps to add new items to your calendar. Still, it’s the perfect option for having a quick glance at what’s coming up next.

CloudApp »

CloudApp is the service I use to quickly share links and files with colleagues, family, and friends. To be fair, Dropbox does offer some similar functionality, but it’s the elegance of the CloudApp service that’s so cool to me. You simply drag a link or file to the icon in the menubar, and the upload begins. The free account allows you 10 uploads each day on files up to 25 MB in size. Upgrading to a paid account allows you to use a custom domain (instead of cl.ly) and unlimited uploads up to 250 MB in size. I haven’t used CloudApp enough to justify upgrading, but I could see graphic designers, in particular, having great use for the service and liking the unlimited plan for that reason.

Radium »

Radium is a nice little app for streaming internet radio from your menubar. I paid just $4.99 for it ¹, and it was well-worth the cost. Most of my local stations are available and it’s also fun to listen to stations from back in New York where I grew up. If you’re a Live 365 or Sirius/XM online subscriber, you’ll probably love the app even more for its presentation of those services. Radium is a lightweight way to listen to internet radio; way better than opening iTunes or launching a web player from your station’s website.

Pyrcast »

Pyrcast is was², simply put, Pandora for the Mac. Call me snobby, but I refuse to use Pandora in the web browser because of its Flash-based design. It just doesn’t work the same or equally well in all browsers. Pyrcast solves this problem really well by syncing to your Pandora account and providing your entire list of saved stations. It also offers Growl support for notifications and global shortcuts for play/pause, skip to next song, and even thumbs up/thumbs down.