Showing Off My Menu

August 19th, 2010

Not just any menu, my Apple OS X menu and the little apps that I use on a day to day basis; this post follows ‘Showing Off My Dock‘ where I listed all the applications I have on my Dock. The applications on the menu bar are slightly different – usually either a preference menus or a small app that does one task and one task only. Here’s what I’ve got;

• LastFM – I initially had LastFM just scrobbling the music that I listened to via iTunes, but I’m now using it as a radio station playing music based on recommendations (based on listening history), or music similar to a favourite producer or band.
• Tweetie – My Twitter client of choice, this just glows blue when I have new tweets, so it’s blue a lot of the time!
• DropBox – I definitely haven’t used this to it’s full potential, at the moment it’s just storing some files I want backing up to the cloud – there hasn’t really been a situation where I’ve needed to share large files with someone, yet.
• JumpCut – I love this app, and couldn’t live without it. It’s a simple clipboard manager that stores your last 20 or so clipboard items. It only stores text – but this is invaluable when copy and pasting content or code.
• Cloud App – This is a beautifully designed app that allows you to share files, all you do is drag a file onto the menu icon and it uploads the file for you and then creates a short URL which is copied to your clipboard ready for sharing via email or Twitter or wherever.
• Mozy – I’ve been using Mozy for quite some time now, I even had a go at their unlimited paid service – but it was going to take days and weeks to upload everything to their servers. I just use the free 2gb of storage to store essential small files like documents, OS set up files, contact lists, calendars and keychains.
• Caffeine – Another small simple app that only does one thing, click the coffee cup and it disables your screen saver and energy saving settings, great for when you’re reading on your laptop.
• Growl – Sticky style notifications, really handy when doing things in the background such as uploading / downloading files.
• Time Machine – I finally got a time machine hard drive, not an Apple Time Capsule – a Western Digital Passport, and now I’m fully backed up, it feels kinda nice.
• International – Keyboard short cuts for special characters.

After putting all the links together for these applications I’ve just realised something; they’re all free!

The rest are pretty standard Mac applications and settings, volume, battery, clock, wireless connection, bluetooth and Spotlight. Let me know if you have any essential menu based applications for OS X in the comments below.

Tags: applications, free downloads, mac, menu, os x, Tools