you know all of those little icons at the top right hand corner of your mac screen they could be making your life a lot easier hello and welcome back to marcos reviews and thank you for subscribing if you have and if you haven’t subscribed you know where the button is i for one used to really neglect the mac os menu bar at the top right hand corner of the screen i just let it fill up with all of these app icons and never really make good use of it now it plays a really important role on all of my macs and that’s for one really simple reason which is i’ve started to use it properly and if you didn’t know the menu bar apps are basically those little icons that appear to the left hand side at the time at the top right hand corner of the screen but the magic really happens when you add third party app menu bar items that’s where you can really get things done quicker and crucially make the most of the apps that you buy so today i’m going to reveal four mac os menu bar apps that i could not do without and i’ll put links to all of them in the description the first menubot app that i could not live without is one password now the reason one password is so useful for me is because i have so many different devices and they’re not all within the apple ecosystem so for instance if i want to set up a new windows laptop or a new android phone the ability to grab all of my usernames and passwords from one password immediately is just so
useful however the other reason one password is really useful is because it doesn’t just store passwords it stores notes driving licenses software licenses basically anything you want to keep a record of and keep safe you can just throw into one password and as you would guess one password is built automatically into the autofill things in safari so if you go into a website that needs a login it will automatically bring up one password you can fill in from there but where it really comes alive for me is the mac os menu bar widget app thing for one password it just means i can retrieve anything from my one password vault really quickly you just click the little one password icon at the top right and it drops down if you haven’t signed into one password so if you haven’t put your password in it will just quickly ask for that obviously you can use touch id if you have a mac with touch id but once you’ve done that it will give you your vault straight away and you can just search for anything within that vault it’s pretty smart as well so it’s aware of which app you’re currently using so if you open the one password menu bar app while you’re using a particular app that requires a login for example and you have that login stored in
your one password vault it will suggest that you go straight to that from the top right hand corner of the screen it’s just so so quick and useful and the best thing is that one password is really affordable and there’s even a 14 day free trial which i’ll link to in my description next up is fantastical which i’ve been a huge fan of for many years and don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong with the built-in mac os calendar app works perfectly well but it is missing one feature which you get with fantastical and that is fantastical’s menu bar app which sits very conveniently at the top right hand corner of the screen and gives you a whole wealth of features a little bit like one password it just means i rarely have to go into fantastical itself in fact i hardly ever go into the app because if you click the fantastical menu bar app at the top right hand corner of the screen you immediately get your calendar from there you can see the entire month you can scroll through to future months past months you can see what’s coming up today you can even add brand
new calendar entries via the awesome predictive text input thing so i use it for checking what’s coming up on my calendar just checking the date it’s very useful for that and adding new things in as well it’s just you can do it’s almost an app by itself you barely need like i say the full-blown fantastical app you can try fantastical for a couple of weeks for free and you do have to pay for it after that but it’s fairly reasonable i think again i’ll put a link in the description text expander is my next menu bar app i’m only a recent convert to this i’ve heard about it for many years it’s talked about a lot on blogs and tech news sites and other youtubers love it and i just for whatever reason haven’t bothered trying it until now and trust me text expander is superb so i think most of us regularly retype the same stuff each day whether it’s your email signature a certain intro to an email for a new client so text expander uses these things called snippets which are basically a preset piece of text like i say it could be one word it could be a whole sentence it could be a whole paragraph it could be an entire email if you wanted to be and then you assign that snippet a short code on the keyboard so for me for example i’ve set up one for my email signature sign off type thing which is just you know thank you mark
whatever it might be and for that i just type in zed sig on the keyboard and it fills it in automatically for me i’ve done the same thing with my mailing address because obviously i deal with a lot of review units for this business and i’m always typing out my address for people to send stuff to so now i just type in zed ad and bang there’s my address but the great thing about textexpander is that you keep adding to it as you go along so while you go through your day you think i’m always typing this thing out constantly ah i can add it to text expander but getting back to what this video is all about which is that lovely little menu bar at the top right hand corner of the screen text expander uses it fantastically so if you click the little text expander icon at the top right corner of the screen you’re given a box which lets you check your snippets remind yourself of the hotkey shortcuts that you set up for your snippets and even add new snippets directly from that window and yes text expander offers a free trial which you can check out by clicking the link in my description lastly we have bartender 4 this is another app which i have previously disregarded but i now could not live without so as i mentioned at the start of this video as you install more apps on your mac a lot of them will add their little icon to the top right hand corner of your screen now there’s two issues with this the first one is that that massive sea of icons just becomes completely
unfathomable that’s what basically led me to completely ignore it in the past the other issue is that if you’ve got a 14 inch or 16 inch macbook pro with a notch the more icons you have in that menu bar the closer they get to going behind the notch which does happen now apple doesn’t offer at the moment any way around this it just keeps adding those icons to your menu bar however if you go and install bartender 4 you can completely fix this problem the premise behind bartender is really simple it just gives you much more control over exactly what appears in your menu bar so when you turn it on you can basically hide certain icons forever unless you want to see them or you can dictate exactly which icons you want to be there all the time so i’ve personally set up bartender to always display one password text expander and fantastic alph obviously but also the mac os shortcut to my focus modes everything else remains hidden until i click the little bartender button on the menu bar and that then reveals all of those icons that i don’t want to see all the time it’s quite smart as well so you can set bartender to display certain icons depending on their status so for instance on my macbooks i make sure that the battery indicator is there when it’s not on charge but as soon as i plug the
macbook in it disappears behind the hidden menu same thing with wi-fi if my wi-fi connection drops i can see that on the menu bar but as soon as it regains its connection it disappears into the secret bartender 4 menu now you buy bartender 4 as a one-off purchase but you can install it on multiple macs it’s not that expensive and there’s also a free trial to give it a go which i’ll link to in the description just a quick note none of the apps i featured today have sponsored this video they are just apps i absolutely love and they’ve made me or helped me make the most of that menu bar but as always i can guarantee i’ve missed a few out that you’re aware of so let me know in the comments what are your favorite mac os menu bar apps and if you’ve still got some time keep watching for a link to a video where i go into my favorite mac os customizations but until next time thank you so much for and i’ll catch you in the next you
