alt Hacker NewsThe notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??"
No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket.
I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app.
Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe.
This could have been handled better.
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It's such a simple problem to solve too: when there are too many menu bar icons, put them in an overflow menu. A single icon which contains a list of icons. And let me arrange which icons go into the top bar and which go into the overflow menu.
Windows solved this many many decades ago with their system tray overflow menu. Browsers solved it too, by letting you put extension icons in an overflow menu. It's not hard.
But nooo, macOS just silently hides applications from you, with no visible indication that there's anything hidden.
The truth is most apps have no business having a menubar icon, but many of them cannot even be disabled out of the box. There's a number of third-party tools that help with the issue, but really this should be handled at the OS level. I want a permission similar to notifications to control whether an app can litter the menubar or not.
It's true this is a mess, but no application should have a menu by icon as its only means of access. It's OK to offer that as an option, but all applications should be capable of presenting a user interface when launched from the Applications directory (or (rarely) ~/Applications, etc).
There's really no exception to this rule. For an (tiny) minority of applications, it makes sense to hide the dock icon, and to typically access the app via hotkey or menu bar widget. But those apps should still have an icon and should still be able to be invoked by opening it using any of the standard ways to do that. That's just how the Mac works.
Ice is an open source app solves this problem through an overflow menu:
I never understood the logic behind the thinking there. Why would you ever want to place menubar items UNDER the notch, if you know it's there and they won't be visible?
It's such an easy problem to fix, with such incredible usability consequences, I just don't get the thinking.
This is not an unknown issue at the fruit co.
Can anyone speculate on any rational if not good reasons for not solving this problem yet?
It's annoying for end-users (and you), but why not display a window with a SUPERSHORT message explaining that MacBooks with a notch might hide the icon on the first launch? Have a button or link to explain more for people who want it.
Shouldn't have to, but it might mitigate some of the stuff a FAQ won't catch.
I’ve been looking for something like your brothers app. Used to use an app called helium for floating video windows. I’ll check it out!
Perhaps people who have many menubar icons are hare-brained and you should check to see how many icons they’ve got before you price your product for them to account for the support overhead.
The reason things are this way is that in Apple’s view, third party devs are effectively misusing menu items.
Originally it wasn’t even possible for third parties to add new menu extras using public APIs. That was something reserved for Apple. Third party devs had to use a tool called MenuCracker.
When Apple finally added the API used now, the intention for it was for full fat GUI programs to provide ephemeral menu item companions that disappear when the host app is quit. It was never intended to facilitate persistent third party menu extras.
So the issue hasn’t been fixed because in Apple’s view it’s a problem of third party devs’ own creation. If all third party menu items were ephemeral nobody would have enough for them to overflow into the notch area.
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Personally I think they should offer a way to extend the Control Center and push devs who want persistence towards that. That would afford better organization for users and allow them to better control which are immediately visible (since some apps don’t offer an option to hide their menu item).