There are two types of Mac users: those who barely use the macOS menu bar and those that cluttered it with app icons. There is no middle ground. In part, the applications themselves decide add an icon to the top bar from macOS. In the upper right corner. From here, you can control video or song playback, turn WiFi on or off, share the screen, or do a thousand and one things, depending on which apps you have installed. What if you could put your mobile apps there?
The macOS menu bar, like the Windows system tray, has always been a usable space to display certain information about your PC or Mac, such as the time, battery level, or notifications. Why not give him more responsibility by adding mobile applications. This is the idea behind MenuBarX.
Technically, this app for macOS is a web browser that integrates into the menu bar. Come on, its function is to open web pages. And therein lies its great utility. what can you open mobile applications in web format instead of installing them from the Mac App Store if you have a Mac with an M1 processor.
The idea behind MenuBarX is similar to other projects that wrap web applications. We have seen several of them in the past. The most recent, WebCatalog and Stack. Its job is to open the mobile apps in their web version instead of downloading and installing the apps on your Mac.
so you don’t have to install or download in several tabs of your default browser or do not install anything. Instead, it tries to open apps as if they were mobile apps built into your Mac. In this case, integrated into the menu bar to disturb the least and take advantage of the space available on your Mac screen, convenient and productive.
Each web application has its own icon. As if they were standalone apps. So you can have Twitter, Instagram, Spotify or TikTok at the small windows which you can open from the keyboard or by clicking on its icons in the menu bar. You avoid having the web browser full of tabs and take better advantage of the screen because these applications open in iPhone or iPad format, taking up less space.
Some apps need the whole screen to work properly. But many others, usually inherited from the iPhone or iPad, with a small rectangle of your Mac screen are more than enough. This is the great advantage of MenuBarX.
For the rest, being a web browser, it has features to customize your experience with these mobile applications. For example, you can switch from user agent To see them pages or apps in PC, Kindle or smartphone format. Or in its equivalent for Mac, iPhone or iPad. Various sizes to choose from depending on which interface you feel most comfortable with.
How could it be otherwise, MenuBarX opens directly in the macOS menu bar. From there, it works like a web browser. But instead of open new tabs in a separate window, use the menu bar as a tab bar. In other words, each new address you open, or each new application, will be seen with your own icon.
As a design, you can see the icons of open tabs following the style of macOS or see them in color. Perhaps this way it will be more comfortable for you to identify them and directly access the mobile applications that you are going to use on your Mac. You can make these and other changes in Preference…, in the MenuBarX application itself. Another interesting change concerns the homepage. By default, it will display the application one. But you can make it a search engine by integrating Google, Duck Duck Go Where Baidu.
As for the tabs you open for mobile apps, you can customize their size. By right-clicking on the icon of each application, you will see the drop-down menu. At Browser Options you can choose different screen sizes: Widget, iPhone SE, Google Nexus 5, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPad mini, etc. Or if you prefer, user agent you have the choice between several sizes: Mobile (iOS Safari), Desktop (macOS) or Mobile (Android). Another interesting option is the one that allows you update or refresh the app or page automatically. By default it is off, but you can turn it on for a few seconds or several minutes, 15 or 30 minutes.
MenuBarX is currently free. It has a Pro version which offers unlimited tabs and unlimited bookmarks. And for now it’s free. Who knows if in the future it will be paying since it integrates new functions. Time will tell. But today it is one of those little utilities that will save you the day if you want to check social networks or some mobile applications directly from your Mac and without constantly staring at your iPhone or Android screen.
