Marcel Winatschek

Eight Items

Mac blogs picked up a meme recently: post a screenshot of your menu bar. The idea being that what you keep up there says something about how you work—how many processes you trust, how much visual noise you can tolerate, what you actually use versus what you leave running out of inertia.

Mine has eight items. Left to right: Azureus, Adium, iScrobbler, Bluetooth, AirPort, volume, date, Spotlight. Looking at other people’s bars, I apparently run a lean setup—most had twice as many icons, a small crowd of utilities jostling for space. I’ve always been like this with interfaces. Strip it back until it hurts, then strip it back a little more.