Filed under: TUAW Tips
TUAW Tip: Managing Menulets
Menulets are
those little menu bar widgets that reside in your menu bar to control such things as monitor resolutions, sound,
Airport network selection, and iChat status. While there are ways to enable most of the menulets via System
Preferences--for instance, you can enable the Display resolutions menulet from the Displays System Preference
pane--there are several that are quite useful that don't have easy ways to get turned on. Two that come to mind
immediately are the PPPoE menulet used for connecting/disconnecting to a PPPoE-based DSL service like Verizon, and the
Eject menulet which allows you to open the tray or eject CD/DVD from your optical drive without having to use the
keyboard's eject button.Launching a menulet to enable it in the menubar is easy once you know where they are located. For both Panther and Tiger, Apple's system menulets are located in: System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras. Double clicking a menulet will enable it in the menu bar.
You can remove a menulet from the menu bar by holding down the Command (Apple) key and dragging the selected menulet off the menu bar. It disappears with a satisfying poof. You can also rearrange the Apple menulets using this same keyboard command and dragging them in the order you desire.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
djones said 11:43AM on 2-10-2006
Very cool Damien, thanks, I had never thought to go looking for those.
As an aside: You don't really use that eject menulet do you? A mouse move and two mouse clicks to eject a disk versus tapping a finger on the top right corner of your keyboard?
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Chris P said 11:57AM on 2-10-2006
The ability to drag the menu icons seems to only work with the Apple installed menulets. My Gmail notifier or checkoff or mousepose' don't respond the same way unfortunately. I guess I just have to open those in the order I want them to appear on my menu bar.
But very good tip!
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Mark Rich said 12:09PM on 2-10-2006
Perhaps you should consider compiling all of these hints and tips into a PDF book to download from this site?
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Mike said 1:23PM on 2-10-2006
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?
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Doug said 2:34PM on 2-10-2006
Menulet? Who made that up? They are called Menu Extras. After all, they are stored in the Menu Extras folder.
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Damien Barrett said 3:31PM on 2-10-2006
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.
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nathan glynn said 4:58PM on 2-10-2006
doesanyone know ifthere is a menu extra/menulet for accessing automator workflows? I think that could be pretty useful.
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James Huston said 6:56PM on 2-10-2006
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.
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britta said 7:12PM on 2-10-2006
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.
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Damien Barrett said 10:56PM on 2-10-2006
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].
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macfanboy said 11:57PM on 2-10-2006
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!
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hugo said 12:36AM on 2-11-2006
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?
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ThePete said 2:51PM on 2-11-2006
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.
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