We usually install apps to accomplish specific tasks. Slack to talk with your colleagues at work, Twitter X to see what people are talking about, Steam to download games, and so on.
Not all apps need to be so serious, though: some can be funny and even silly. The macOS menu bar is a great place to store these tiny nuggets that help us take a break. Here are some of the best not useless, but also not entirely useful, menu bar apps.
Mac models are known for their aesthetic, functional keyboards, but they lack something their mechanical counterparts are very good at: typing sounds. FunKey makes this is longer an issue: click the menu bar icon to enable, disable, and customize your keyboard’s sounds. And that’s not all: it’s also able to add clicking sounds as well, for a completely noisy package.
Are you in need of a good conversation starter? Or just love cats and want to know curiosities about them? Cat Fact puts an icon on your menu bar that, when clicked, shows, guess what, a fact about cats.
Tired of the terrible work required to check your connection? Opening Terminal, typing “ping,” and then testing a web address can get tedious. Fret not! Pingu has it sorted for you! Click the icon, select one of the options, and it will ping the site you want.
This app actually doesn’t have a name yet. Software engineer Tru Narla was inspired by Apple Health’s scroll distance tracking and decided to do something similar for Macs. A bit of code later, the world now has a tool to track how far your cursor has traveled.
If you’d rather measure your usage in time rather than how far your cursor could be, we’ve got you covered. Aware puts a “stopwatch” on your menu bar that shows how much you have used your Mac. If the computer remains inactive for some time, the counter resets.
You may prefer instead to know how long until you can punch out from work and go home. Developer Sindre Sorhus gets you. He created Day Progress, an app that displays a graph showing how much time until “the end of the day”. Starting and end hours are fully customizable, so you can adapt it to your work schedule.
Sindre has dozens of tiny utilities like that for macOS, some of which can actually improve your quality of life. You can check his website for more apps.
Ok, Banana Bin is funny, but isn’t exactly a “menu bar” app. Its sole feature is to display an animation with flies over your Dock’s recycle bin when it reaches a size threshold. In my defense, the banana icon used to configure the app lives in the menu bar.
Similarly, iCloud Kicker’s sole feature doesn’t reside on the menu bar itself. This app “kicks” your iCloud sync so it gets back to work after getting stuck. The icon to trigger this action is, accordingly, a boot.
Just so you know, iCloud syncing issues have a few possible causes. If nsurlsessiond, one of iCloud’s syncing processes, gets stuck, we have a guide to help you.
DockX too isn’t a “menu bar-only” app. As the name implies, it also depends heavily on the Dock.
What has earned DockX a place in this list is its icon customization feature. Would you rather have a kitten-themed resource tracker instead of your RAM being represented by a RAM stick icon? No problem, DockX can do it for you!
DockX has labels, so you won’t get lost trying to figure out which icon (or GIF!) stands for which resource. Oh, and, as the name implies, they can also be used on the Dock.
Sometimes no words can express our feelings — we need memes. To help you with that, Guifero puts a GIF search right there, you bet, on your menu bar. You can also use it from the Dock or via a hotkey, too. Type what you’re looking for, find the right GIF, and then just drag and drop it to the other app’s window.
Not everything we do with our devices needs to be serious and focused. Adding small moments of silliness to our days helps us get through them with less weariness. That’s precisely what these funny little menu bar apps do.
One issue that may arise is the lack of menu bar space, especially if you own a notched Mac. In this case, one solution is using an ultrawide monitor — though macOS is less-than-stellar in dealing with such displays.
Another option is trying a menu bar organizer, like Bartender, which helps hide unnecessary icons. After all, why display needless things like time and battery percentage if they take the space your precious cat facts require?