TUAW Tip: Managing Menulets

Damn, I wish that the eject menu would work with all ejectable drives (like external USB and/or FW drives). Not a huge deal, but it would be nice to have another option.

Ok so I'm new to posting on tuaw, but I thought this might be just the place to ask this question. I like the way ClearDock can make my dock clear and then i adjust the settings in Mac OSX to automatically hide the dock, but my question is: Is there a way to get the menu bar to automatically hide too? Or better yet, is there a third party program out there that can the menu bar clear too?

Damien, you are my hero. I have been stuck with a MS keyboard for about a month now, and have been using iTunes on my iMac G4 to open the SuperDrive when there is nothing in it. The eject menulet does the trick perfectly! Thanks!

James, do a Google search on "menulet." I'm not making this up. This usage has been around for quite awhile.

It's at least a better term than "haxie". [Shudder].

nathan: the bottom of this page looks helpful - http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/automator/tutorial8.html . and a snippet of self-promotion: i updated http://menu.jeweledplatypus.org/ the other day. more items! yay.

I've never heard of menulet until this posting. Even Unsanity used Menu Extra when naming a hack (Menu Extra Enabler) to work around Apple's limit on only loading Apple Menu Extras.

The ones that can move around and can be dragged off are loaded by the SystemUIServer. Back in the day any one could use that but third party menu extras could causes crashes in a rather important background process. Apple hard coded a list of menu extras that could load and made an application level API for third parties to use.

doesanyone know ifthere is a menu extra/menulet for accessing automator workflows? I think that could be pretty useful.

They've been called menulets by people for quite awhile, at least since Jaguar but I think even earlier. Do a simple Google search and you'll see that many people, including professional Mac book authors, referring to these as menulets.

It's true that Apple prefers to call these "Menu Extras" in their developer documentation, but there is substantial references and evidence that "menulet" is also accepted terminology.

Menulet? Who made that up? They are called Menu Extras. After all, they are stored in the Menu Extras folder.

I can't speak from experience djones, but I read somewhere that any connected optical drive will appear in the menulet list and you can thus choose which drive you wish to eject. Can anyone confirm this for me?