Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

Menulets

Apple calls them Menu Extras, but Mac fans on the Internet have named the little menu-bar icons shown in Figure 1-8 menulets. Most are both indicators and menus that provide direct access to settings in System Preferences. However, there’s more to them than you may suspect.

Figure 1-8. You can rearrange the icons (including the clock) by holding down the key and dragging them around the menu bar. You may wish to position your most-used icon in the top-right corner, so it never gets cut off by a program with numerous menus.

Menulet Basics

In general, you install a menulet by turning on the representative checkbox in System Preferences. You’ll find such checkboxes in the Date & Time, Displays, Sound, and other panels.

You can remove a menulet by

-dragging it off of your menu bar (or by turning off the corresponding checkbox in System Preferences). You move them around on the menu bar the same way—by

-dragging them horizontally.

Note

If you have a small computer screen, OS X may cut off the leftmost menulets when you have a program with a lot of menus open. (This happens on some laptop screens when using Xcode, for example.) For this reason, it’s best to position your most essential menulets on the right—that way, they’ll never get cut off.

The Secret Eject Icon

The prescribed way to eject a CD or DVD is to press the Eject (or F12) key on your keyboard. That’s not much help if you have a non-Apple keyboard, though (or if, thanks to a rash of bad luck, you find yourself without a keyboard altogether).

Fortunately, there’s a secret way to accomplish the same thing: install the Eject menulet.

To find the installer, open your hard drive → System → Library → CoreServices → Menu Extras folder. Inside that window, double-click the icon called Eject.menu.

Now look at your menu bar: there’s the new Eject icon (second from left in Figure 1-8). Use it like a menu to choose the drive you’d like to eject.