: My favorite Mac Twitter client, I don’t have it open all the time but often enough to warrant inclusion in my Mac Menu Bar Post. I only let the bird light up blue if there are new @replies or new DMs.
Timing: The latest addition to my Menu Bar is Timing. It’s a utility app that runs just in the Menu Bar and keeps track of where you’re spending time on your computer. The app does all the heavy lifting of tracking what apps I’m active in, what websites I’m spending time on, and more. Then I can bundle those apps into “projects” (or categories, as I consider them) of work. You have to give Timing a few weeks to really get some good useful stats that you can look over in aggregate to see how you are spending your time, where you’re spending it, and if there are certain apps or websites you need to be more conscious of in order to be more focused and productive.
Dropbox: I keep it monochrome and am on the fence about if I actually prefer to not have it in the Menu Bar or not. I like seeing that everything in Dropbox on my Mac is up to date, but that’s about all I use the Menu Bar icon for.
Droplr: I use this for uploading screenshots, sharing files, and shortening URLs. It’s a great utility app and runs very quickly. Also, I have the keyboard shortcut set to CTRL+OPT+CMD+D to enable “Droplrizing” whatever URL or file I have selected at the time.
Fantastical: I’m a big fan of this nimble yet powerful calendar app. CMD+OPT+C brings it up and I can quickly toss in a new event using Fantastical’s natural language parser, and I can quickly see the month at a glance and what events are on my plate for today and tomorrow. For the times I need full-fledged calendar I use BusyCal.
Airport Networks: I’m sure I could get by without Airport status showing in the Menu Bar but I really like to have that quick-visual status update on if I’m connected, how strong the signal is, and if I need to quickly re-boot Wi-Fi.
Battery Status: Same as Airport networks, I like to see about how much battery I’ve got.
Clock: For seeing what time it is.
Spotlight: For searching for documents. Since I use LaunchBar to launch applications, bookmarks, and even navigate to folders, I do not use Spotlight all that often. There are tricks to remove the Spotlight icon but when I do use spotlight I prefer using it up there in the top-right corner – especially with its improvements in Lion.
What you don’t see:
TextExpander: By default TextExpander runs with an icon in the Menu Bar but you don’t have to have it there. It can be handy if you have many, many snippets that you don’t remember the shortcuts to and so you can access them by clicking on the Menu Bar icon. But I prefer to let TextExpander run in the background and if/when I need to access it I do so via LaunchBar.
An Icon for my application launcher, LaunchBar, because it doesn’t have one. (Thankfully.)
(From Shawn Blanc, author of ShawnBlanc.net and Tools and Toys, in 2011)