I can tell that I’m back on the Mac fulltime, because the upper right side of my menubar is starting to fill up with icons. I don’t find it the least bit distracting to keep icons on the menubar. Certainly it’s easier on the eyes and more functional that the Windows notification area.

Anyway, I’m catching up on feeds and I caught Merlin Mann talking about his menubar. Here’s mine:

From left to right:

• Adium – Trillian, what’s Trillian?
• Quicksilver – The one application I used continually even when my Mac was my 2nd computer. It’s amazing and I find myself lost if it’s not running. But come on, it’s it time to drop the “beta” version numbers?
• Plaxo – They used to be evil. They’re not anymore. Keeps all my applications that have address books using the same address book. Plaxo 3 is in preview mode. Not quite ready for prime time, but I’m enjoying the promise of what’s to come.
• Twitterific – I keep the tweets in a far corner of my 2nd display, with no noise. That way I can look at it when I want to, but otherwise it doesn’t get in my way.
• Missing Sync for Blackberry – For syncing contacts and notes to my Blackberry, mostly. I have no problem pulling tasks and calendar data through the browser. But I need contacts integrated with the phone and email so I have to sync to the built-in applications. I would love over-the-air syncing of contacts, maybe via Plaxo and then I wouldn’t have to plug the Blackberry into the computer much at all.
• Growl – Love it. So many of my favorite applications including Transmit, Thunderbird, Skype, Adium, Flickr Uploadr, Plaxo and Twitterific now support Growl notifications. One little non-intrusive window that lets you know what’s going on. Mac apps when done well are elegant. Growl is a case in point.
• Spanning Sync – Google Calendar is my calendar of choice. Spanning Sync matches it up to iCal so Missing Sync can get it to my Blackberry. Works well in theory, but has some server issues and problems with duplicates. I hope it improves. For now, until I can find a more reliable way of getting Google Calendar data to my Blackberry, it will have to suffice.
• ChronoSync – I can’t even remember how long ago I bought this fantastic backup application. Maybe even before I started this blog. It’s what I use to backup my files to external drives every night. I know there are other backup utilities, but ChronoSync has behaved flawlessly and I see no reason to use anything else.
• Displays – Since I use two displays, I find it handy to keep the icon in the menubar.
• Airport – All the connection issues we had seem to have gone away since we 1. changed the wireless channel and 2. dumped Vonage.
• Volume, battery, clock, bluetooth and Spotlight – basic Apple stuff.