Finding Menu Extras
TMO Quick Tip - Finding Menu Extras
by , 7:30 AM EST, November 1st, 2006
Mac OS X has all kinds of useful items that can live in your menu bar if you only know where to look. The menu bar clock, AirPort, Volume and Bluetooth are some of the items most users are familiar with, but there are more. Most can be activated by settings in Preference Panes, but for others you need to dig a little deeper.
Mac OS X hides menu extras on your hard drive in System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras. To add one to your menu bar, just double click its file in the Menu Extras folder.
 Menu extras are hidden in the System folder. |
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One of my favorites is Eject.menu. This handy menu extra adds an Eject icon to your menu bar that lists every optical drive connected to your Mac. If you have multiple CD or DVD drives, it lets you select exactly which drive to open when you want to add or remove a disc.
 The Eject menu lets you specify which optical drive to open. |
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To reposition an item in the menu bar, click and drag its icon to the left or right while holding down the Command key. If you don't need an icon in the menu bar any more, Command-drag it down and out of the menu bar. It will disappear in a puff of smoke. The original item is still in the Menu Extras folder, so you can reactivate it again later.
Keep in mind that mucking around in your System folder can lead to trouble - including a Mac that no longer boots - if you aren't careful. If you aren't 100 percent sure what something does, leave it alone.
if you have ideas for Mac related tips that you think other TMO readers might find helpful.
Observer Comments
I'd like it a lot more if one could also use it to unmount disk images. For those of us with only one optical drive (and not running an earlier version of OS X where the Eject key sometimes doesn't work), it's pretty much useless.
BTW, not only is the login process still screwy (most of the time I try to login, nothing happens), but the spamblock text thing at the bottom for guest posters doesn't work for me either. It always says I entered it incorrectly.
Wed Nov 01, 2006 2:27 pm Subject: Sidebar & External drives
Quotemrhooks wrote:
I'd like it a lot more if one could also use it to unmount disk images. For those of us with only one optical drive (and not running an earlier version of OS X where the Eject key sometimes doesn't work), it's pretty much useless.
You didn't say what OS you're using. In Panther and Tiger, at least, you can set the Finder preferences to include removable media in the sidebar. That will show an eject icon next to mounted disk images.
FWIW, in Panther, the eject menu does not show my external FireWire CD-RW drive, whether it has a CD in the drive or not.
Note that this is in reference to the "System" domain - that is, the Library folder which is within the "System" folder at the root of your drive, NOT the Library folder at the root of your drive directly.
The different domains (System, Local, User) are quite beneficial features of the Mac OS X filesystem, but they can certainly be confusing to explain to users. The guidelines to keep in mind:
- OS-related items are in the System domain (/System/Library)
- Application-related, or admin-related, items are in the Local domain (/Library) - these are still common across all users
- User-related items (unique per user) are in the User domain (~/Library) - these are unique PER user (i.e. a Font available to User1, will not be available to User2)
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