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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).

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.

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.

I'm curious if people even cared about the half-centimeter extra screen space they got when Apple introduced the notch into MacBooks. Arguably it makes a bigger difference in iPhones so I'll grant them that, even if it does hide half of the top bar of the iPhone. But did people hate the half centimeter bezel on macs that much that they wanted to lose an inch of their task bar? Genuinely curious how we got here!

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.

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.

Ice is an open source app solves this problem through an overflow menu:

https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice

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?

Once you find out that the notch can hide app items it makes you want to throw your computer out of a window.

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!

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.

There is no reason for apps to be in the menubar. Either they should have a dock icon or be hidden completely. And open a window with functions and settings when opened by spotlight.

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.

This was always my biggest gripe about using a mac, the OS that "just works". I ended up a bunch of commands I had to run and a stack of apps I needed to install for it to feel usable.

My only gripe, it only seems to apply to the macOS items. The ones put there by apps still seem to be spaced out the same as before. The macOS ones are definitely closer.

Been using this trick for a while. It's wild that this isn't exposed in System Settings somewhere. macOS basically treats third-party menu bar apps as second-class citizens and then acts surprised when users are confused.

This is so much better, thank you for this.

with nix-darwin you can declare that config:

  system.defaults.NSGlobalDomain = {  
    NSStatusItemSpacing = 2;  
    NSStatusItemSelectionPadding = 2;  
  };

Hmmm, is this supposed to do something on OSX 26.3? I tried setting it to 10 and it doesn't seem to do anything? Wonder if there's something new for Tahoe.

Thank you!

Do you have anything else as useful as this? THis is perfect

Dude. How am I only just learning this? This needs to be plastered loudly over the internet

what are the default values, in case someone wants to restore them?

It really is very simple. Because people keep purchasing their products.

Tailscale will enable all of this.

Set up a US device as an exit node, and configure other devices to proxy through it.

Yes, you've described Tailscale + Exit Nodes + Tailnet that you invite your family to. Install Tailscale and enable some devices as exit nodes - it's pretty much as simple as that.

Surprised noone mentioned netbird. I got annoyed of unpredictable speeds I'd get via tailscale and the fact that I am not in charge of my VPN. I now rent a 5 euro VPS at Hetzner(get an ip with it) and host netbird running on it and my home server/pc as an exit node.

I just use WireGuard to connect my local network. I see no point in throwing a middleman into the mix.

I'm using tailscale for this and am finding it great. I have an Unraid home server/NAS, which has quite nice tailscale integration. The server can be used as an exit node, and each containerized application/workload can be configured to use tailscale and get a nice (https) address that works in your tailnet. I'm not close to hitting the free tier limits, though I'd be happy to pay for it (and I do pay for mullvad through them)

Tailscale is probably what you want, but if you care about privacy you'll have to be sure to disable the telemetry/logging/spying option on each of your nodes.

By default it will leak your so-called “private” network behavior to Tailscale (connections on what port, from what node, to what node, opened when, closed when): https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging

Related question: how are people handling adding family members of varying technical abilities to your tailnets? Does each family member get a separate user so you can manage their access? For my immediate family I was just logging tailscale in as me on their devices, but that becomes a pain when they get logged out and need me to log in again before things go back to working.

tailscale has a feature called "funnel" that will let others connect to a service running on your tailnet, even if they dont use tailscale themselves

if you are behind cgnat (both ipv4, ipv6) then vps, have public ipv6 then you can connect via public domain (ddns openwrt) and if you have a public ip, wireguard it is

I found good success with OpenWRT/Tomato and WireGuard.

The interface is bad when it comes to provisioning but it can be done with a QR code and once it works the native experience of turning on the VPN was just stunningly fast. In this day and age you expect things to be slow with negotiation and various unreliable steps but it was just amazing that I tap the VPN button on iOS and it's connected in a fraction of a second.

This is a real problem, but when I complain about it I get told to just "hide the icons you don't care about" as if that's a solution.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47346079

Yep, and there's no indication that anything is hidden, no dropdown/etc.

This is genuinely shocking that Apple is not handling that. Talk about quite a decline in one of their flagship products.

It's not even an edge case. It should have been considered an inevitable case.

Really depressing design dereliction and/or incompetence.

I run into it when using Rider. I have text size increased on my Macbook and Rider has 8000 menu items, so my menu icons (all of which are default macOS, no third-party stuff) will be hidden to make room for Rider's stuff. I have to switch over to another workspace or window (i.e. away from Rider) if I want to access one of them. It's annoying but I'm not sure who I blame here; Rider I guess, for having a zillion menu items.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/8y0QbZN

The gap between "Run" and "Tests" is the notch, which I don't usually notice is there unless I'm in Rider.

If you're visually impaired, you can hit it even with just a few icons on a 14" laptop. Fonts anything other than tiny + overloaded menus + even a handful of app icons means I always hit this unless I'm docked.

Hacky menu bar modification tools are basically an accessibility requirement for me, and my vision isn't even that bad. (Best corrected is 20/30 or 20/40 or so.) People with serious impairments are totally screwed by this on macOS, sometimes even with large external monitors.

Yeah, I was surprised that something this obvious wasn't addressed.

Investing in a visual redesign (Liquid Glass) but not an obvious UX issue of the notch hiding icons seems like a mis-prioritization.

Yes it is genuinely infuriating that this is the case for a company that for so long was praised for their superior UX.

This along with the tons of other paper cuts they've slacked on is tarring their brand.

With some apps, I can't remember if tailscale is one I don't think so but another vpn we use is, it's even worse because opening them only creates the menubar icon. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out why the vpn wouldn't start before I realised it was just hidden. No feedback at all

It was Windows 7 when Microsoft added an overflow for tray icons, not XP.

Just take Ice's source and have Claude whip you up the features you want. Keep it to yourself. Takes an afternoon and doesn't have other people calling you a sloplogist.

https://github.com/jordanbaird/Ice

To be clear: this is not really new with the notch. It's been menu bar icon behavior for decades where if there isn't enough space for all the menus plus menu icons, menu icons disappear with no way to get to them. The notch just acts like the last menu item now (albeit even if there's space between the last menu item and the notch, for applications without a ton of menus).

And yes, it's completely bizarre that macOS doesn't provide an overflow menu. Instead, again yes for decades, you've had to buy/use something like Bartender for this. It is utterly bizarre and inexplicable.

With Tahoe, Apple has finally provided a half-solution, which is that in System Settings you can entirely hide select running menubar utilities to regain some space. But of course that's only helpful for utilities you never need to look at or click.

tl;dr: yes this is utterly absurd but it's been absurd for decades. It's nothing to do with recent versions of macOS.

> I know software quality has been going down in recent versions of macOS

Note that this particular problem has existed for well over a decade. It's atrocious, but let's not pretend it's anything new.

One of the mentioned apps, Bartender, was sold to a third party [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40584606

I think they've cleaned it up since then [1], but in the age of supply chain attacks, very concerning. Personally, even as a paying user of Bartender, I moved to the open source solution, at least I can watch the github for changes.

[1] https://www.macbartender.com/b5blog/Lets-Try-This-Again/

It is ! I’m “solving” it with an app called bartender. It’s hacked and sometimes doesn’t work but was the only way I could manage this problem…

Apple software sucks so bad!

Yes, it's terrible and something even Windows handles better. It's one of those utterly bizarre Apple things which make me wonder which old product guy has dirt on everyone else at the company.

I’m on mobile so don’t have the link handy but there’s a fork called Thaw that has been getting frequent updates

I’ve been using this for years. It’s simple and works perfectly: https://github.com/dwarvesf/hidden

KDE has it included!

> Actually one of the tools that you could use to admin your mum & dad computer

I do exactly this! I keep Tailscale running my family's shared iMac, making it easy for me to remotely connect to it and screen share if necessary to help. I went a more complicated route[0] and installed Tailscale as a system background daemon that runs as root and starts up before the first user login. Which also means no GUI interface, so more protected from user error.

[0] https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/wiki/Tailscaled-on-ma... (the standalone variant is also entirely opensource, unlike their macOS GUI app)

I thought it was just Tailscale trying to style their blogpost into a news article.

They might be out of courage.

Re: buggy GNOME extensions, it drives me nuts that GNOME has no built in support for menu bar icons/app indicators.

There's a whole class of GUI apps that should run in the background until needed, and GNOME just has no solution here. I really don't get why they removed this functionality.

I don't want a "service" model where you start/stop gui apps via systemd. And I don't want to keep a window around for no good reason.

this may have been what you were referring to with “ buggy GNOME extensions”, but in case it wasn’t:

https://tailscale.com/docs/features/client/linux-systray

From the article:

> As we noted at its September beta release, a windowed version of Tailscale’s macOS app doesn’t replace the menu bar app, but runs alongside it. It can be pulled up from the Dock or a Spotlight search, and makes a lot of Tailscale data and features more accessible.

https://tailscale.com/docs/integrations/identity/passkeys

Not exactly, though many apps violate Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for macOS menu bar extras[1]:

Let people — not your app — decide whether to put your menu bar extra in the menu bar. Typically, people add a menu bar extra to the menu bar by changing a setting in an app’s settings window. To ensure discoverability, however, consider giving people the option of doing so during setup.

Avoid relying on the presence of menu bar extras. The system hides and shows menu bar extras regularly, and you can’t be sure which other menu bar extras people have chosen to display or predict the location of your menu bar extra.

Consider exposing app-specific functionality in other ways, too. For example, you can provide a Dock menu that appears when people Control-click your app’s Dock icon. People can hide or choose not to use your menu bar extra, but a Dock menu is aways available when your app is running.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

Yes, it was a huge mistake to allow any random app developer to claim such a prominent and limited piece of screen real estate. But it’s been an option for so long now that everyone will scream bloody murder if they try take it away.

Apple’s opinion seems to be: running out of space happens to only a few people running tons of menu-bar-loving apps, so if you are dorky enough to run into this problem, you should be dorky enough to solve it yourself.

I think they mean developers have no way of requesting or specifying order.

I feel like every app I use has gotten buggier in Tahoe, I suppose major UI rewrites will do that.

Yes it is

I use Tailscale from the App Store. To allow SSH access I simply turn on the Apple-preinstalled SSH daemon.

Never heard of it, could you send us a reference? What do you use instead?

This was driving me nuts but at some point very recently they added a "Hide Dock Icon" to settings.

tailscale offers many good things.

for example "tailscale" drop for free, share files between devices on your network

also https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel which is cloudflare tunnel alternative, no more localtunnel or other things

so i am not surprized people like it as product, most good features are free.

Being a principled, critical thinker sure has its costs these days. Yeah, that's right, I said it. Flag me (lol).

It was way worse before AI

I feel like you don’t use tailscale. Because I use it every day - and I get confused when I can’t find it.

You're the one losing the plot. It's optional, still closes to the system tray without you explicitly docking it. It doesn't emerge at random like McAfee.

> Eventually it got so bad Microsoft just baked it into the OS. Tailscale is on even worse footing here because Apple is even quicker to act when you destroy user experience.

So Apple are going to bake Tailscale into the OS? Also, read the blog. It's a response to Apple's bad user experience.

I have too many toolbar icons, so I do actually want the window to switch to so I can copy and paste IP addresses. I already keep it open so I can just command-tab to the window, and it's way better this way.

I use tailscale every single day.