SecondBar

Mar 10

SecondBar Add comments

Hi,

as SecondBar got featured on Lifehacker today (thank you!!) and thus many people came here, now a few words to SecondBar:

I know there are a lot of things that don’t work good and I didn’t work on it for quite a while because of the success of BetterTouchTool and limited time… A few days ago I began working on SecondBar again and I hope to release a updated version tonight. Unfortunately it will never be possible to support all apps perfectly because apps like adobe photoshop don’t support the accessibility api very well and make it impossible to fetch the needed data or slow the process down extremely which causes the menu in SecondBar to behave very slowly.

A solution I thought about was to allow you to create own menus for programs which are not supported well. So you could define menu items and then define actions those menu items should trigger. So e.g. you add a Menu “Drawing” and add various menu items to it like “Add Circle” and then assign a shortcut this menu item should trigger like “ctrl + cmd + c” or something. Do you think this could be useful for you? (You can assign shortcuts to every MenuItem in every program you use in the System Preferences =>Keyboard => shortcuts)

Also I hope to add the possibility to have multiple SecondBars (for systems with more than two monitors) soon.

//edit: here a first bugfix release download & use at your own risk It’s currently not on autoupdate because it’s the first version after a long time and maybe I missed some things.

These features will take at least one week to program so be patient but I hope this will be a good solution.

written by Andreas Hegenberg

2 Pings to “SecondBar”

Randnotiz | Reconsidering Secondbar | macfidelity Says:
March 11th, 2010 at 5:17 pm
[...] quasi nichts mehr an Secondbar passierte – verwarf ich meine Hoffnung …. welche nun mit dieser Ankündigung wieder minmal [...]
Como tener la barra de menú de Mac OS X en un segundo monitor Says:
March 12th, 2010 at 6:14 pm
[...] para descargar SecondBar. Archivado en Software Deja aquí tu comentario ↓ Etiquetas Mac OS X, Pantalla, [...]

16 Responses to “SecondBar”

1. Jamo Says:
March 10th, 2010 at 3:51 pm
I quite enjoy this idea. Often times I really have to dive deep into the menu bars for something that I use all of the time that I believe should be just right there on top. Such as a make shapes drop-down menu that just has all of the shapes listed right there.
Oh and is safe to assume that we will be able to use this feature when we are only hooked up to one monitor?
2. Nathan Says:
March 10th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Wow, thank you so much for this. This was my number one complaint about OS X!

Is there anywhere to leave a paypal donation? I definitely want to see continued development of this!
3. pbernery Says:
March 10th, 2010 at 7:47 pm
works for me! great
4. Jacob Says:
March 10th, 2010 at 9:28 pm
Thanks for this, it works great.

My only complaint is that the look and feel of it isn’t right and doesn’t mimic the real menubar. But I guess that can be fixed once the bugs are ironed out.
5. Teo Says:
March 11th, 2010 at 7:15 am
Oh yes,
I recently tried second-bar and liked it, The only thing that annoyed me was the way it looks,
Do you think you could make it look the same as the snow leopard one

Thanks,
Teo
6. Du Song Says:
March 11th, 2010 at 8:23 am
Thanks and you could set category of this post to SecondBar so that ppl can easily find it.
7. fidel Says:
March 11th, 2010 at 8:50 am
Great to see Secondbar gets your focus again
8. Heiko Says:
March 11th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Hi there,
I recently downloaded your BetterTouchTool. At first I liked it a lot (still do) but I noticed that since installation randomly my apps started crashing.
Just wanted to let you know. Using Snow Leopard.
Thanks

Heiko
9. Andreas Hegenberg Says:
March 11th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
@heiko which version are you using? It’s really strange because BTT should really not be able to crash your apps. What do they behave like if they crash?
10. Davide Says:
March 11th, 2010 at 9:23 pm
I love your draggin’ implementation because when you use apple implementation it adds a delay to clicks when you TAP on the touchpad.. it’s a matter of 100 / 200 ms but it’s really annoying. Your implementations is a lot faster recognizing taps and I hope you don’t change it.
11. Torsten Says:
March 12th, 2010 at 1:11 am
Wonderful, some diehard apple fanboys will refuse that a second menu bar is desparately needed – but for every other person used to use their 2 Screen set up productively and not just for show your app is right on target. Please invest some more time for it. It is much appreciated.
12. Neil Says:
March 12th, 2010 at 5:07 pm
Not to diminish the good work being done here, but if you’re looking for other options, DejaMenu works quite well. It’s a contextual menu instead of a top menu bar, but should have good support for most application’s menus. YMMV.

http://homepage.mac.com/khsu/DejaMenu/DejaMenu.html
13. Andreas Hegenberg Says:
March 12th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
@Neil DejaMenu is great but I think it will have the same problems with the same programs as SecondBar because they most likely use the same technique as SecondBar for getting the menubar information
14. Cmatt85 Says:
March 12th, 2010 at 7:51 pm
This is an incredible program, which even in it’s current stat greatly enhances OSX’s Multi-display and large display support. I can’t wait for the upcoming releases.
15. jmobile Says:
March 13th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
How can someone send you a few bucks to support your efforts? Secondbar’s functionality is something I’ve been looking for on the Mac since migrating from Windows. Being able to size the windows to half so quickly saves me time every time I use it. Please post here how to send you PayPal funds, as I’m sure others would, too. Or is this eventually going to be a paid app? If that’s the case, I’d gladly pay for it.

(If you could also e-mail me your PayPal address, that’d be great, so that I don’t miss it in these comments.)
16. neorizer Says:
March 17th, 2010 at 9:57 pm
It seems version 0.00965 broke the window positioning feature, e.g. terminal and firefox don’t resize to the right or left of the current screen anymore. They change position, but don’t resize. Furthermore, maximize window does not maximize the current window, it leaves a small gap of space to the left. In order to really maximize a window now, I have to drag it to the left and resize it to the right.