After reading Ross Hill’s post about his minimal OS X menubar, I decided I’d try it on mine. I’m picky about these things, so I think my menu bar looked pretty good to start with, but it was busy.

So I started looking, and thought, well there are a couple of things I can remove, but no, I use almost all of that stuff!

With Ross’ help though (i.e. him telling me I was wrong), I pared it down to something that I think is looking pretty good.

All the stuff left I actually really do use a lot. In particular, the CPU/memory/network meters are really useful to tell what’s going on with the system, when I’m writing code and running specs etc, I use them constantly.

A nice improvement I’ve noticed already is that now Tweetie is only visible in my Dock (which is hidden), I’m not constantly distracted by new tweets. When that little icon turns blue, I can’t help but click it. Marking the hidden dock icon on mentions and DMs, and then checking it periodically, when I think to, is much less disruptive.

Cheers Ross :)