One of my favorite Mac utilities is Bartender, which allows you to create a sub-menu in the menubar. I run an ever-fluctuating set of utilities in my menubar and sometimes they end up filling up the whole bar to such an extent that they get buried under application menus. This is particularly a problem if you are working on a small laptop that doesn’t have much menubar space to begin with.

Bartender fixes this. Specifically, it lets you choose whether a menubar icon exists in the menubar proper or Bartender’s sub-menu. Using Bartender you can take control of your menubar without giving up any of your beloved menubar applications. It even, remarkably, works with Apple menubar applications.

An often overlooked feature of Bartender is the ability to promote a menubar application to the menubar proper when it is active. By checking a box in the preferences, you can move a menubar application to the main menubar whenever it’s doing something or for a set period of time after it’s doing something. This is particularly useful for applications like Transporter and Dropbox where you don’t need to see them often but when they are active, it’s nice to have quick access. I call it the five second rule.

If you haven’t tried Bartender yet, you should. It’s a simple app that brings sanity to your geeky menubar. If you have Bartender already, take a look at the preference and enable a few of your own five second rules.