Comment by clawoo
5 months ago
> While it offers many features, I've refused to pay for a solution to Apple's poor design decision.
Well then you're in luck, because there's a free app called Hidden Bar[1] on the Mac App Store that allows you to hide icons which you're not interested in.
I am not affiliated with the author(s?), I am just a happy user and I would probably be using it even if the Macbook didn't have a notch.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066?mt=12
> Well then you're in luck, because there's a free app called Hidden Bar[1] on the Mac App Store that allows you to hide icons which you're not interested in.
Author here: I did try Hidden Bar yesterday before finding this workaround and I uninstalled it today. I want to see all of the 16 apps that I have. I don't want to hide any of them. By changing the whitespace mentioned in the blog post I now can see all of them.
This is only of limited help. If I didn't want a program to have a menu icon, I wouldn't be running that program, or would have configured it to not have an icon. Hidden Bar's entire purpose is to hide the infrequently needed icons, conversely, it needs to expose them when I un-hide icons.
If there are too many, some end up under the notch, even though there's room on the other side of it for them in most cases. That's just Apple shipping a bug and not fixing it.
Hidden bar has the added benefit of not asking to record your screen, an insane thing to consent to for this very basic bit of functionality.
Still sort of insane that you need extra apps to fix an issue that Microsoft figured out decades ago. The GP says it was in Windows Vista, but I'm pretty sure even Windows 98 had it. I know XP did.
How has Apple not addressed this?
Weirder still is that they did, they have an entire expanding control panel pane with redundant pop out controls for stuff that was previously in the menu bar, they just failed to universally integrate it with the system so that third parties could use it.
98 did not, XP was the first one. So, this was addressed there merely 23 years ago, give them some slack! ;)