The number of people who enjoy a dual-monitor workspace are increasing as the prices of monitors go down, and as the need for more real estate goes up.
People like you and me, who spend most of their online time with more than 15 tabs open on the Internet, reading their RSS Feed, and replying to E-mails and IMs, need the extra space.
With Mac OS X, extending your Monitor is as easy as plugging it in. But there’s a catch. Once you set where you want your Dock and Menu bar to appear, that’s that.
If your workstation is composed of high-resolution, large monitors, then you are up for a treat. Imagine having to go from one monitor, all the way back to the other, so you can access the File or Edit Menu of the application you are currently on. It may sound as a minute task to worry about, but in reality, it can become a real hassle.
SecondBar is an addon by Andreas Hegenberg, which adds a Menu bar on your secondary screen, effectively allowing you to use the menus of your running Application without having to move away from your screen.
The bar looks like this:
The Bar has been Shortened for the sake of fitting.
Although the bar emulates the original bar’s functions, it does not show anything else other than the Menus of the currently running application and the Time. For example: if you are running Dropbox, although it will appear on your primary screen’s menu bar, it will not appear on the secondary screen’s menu bar. Also, if you have changed your clock to be showing time in Analog on your primary screen, the secondary screen will be showing the time in the default Digital format.
Next to the clock, we observe a tiny arrowhead facing down. Clicking on that pops up the menu shown above. The options are pretty clear.
Using the Preferences menu you can change the appearance of the SecondBar, to give a more personal feel to it. You can change the opacity, make it draggable and move it wherever you want, and set a hotkey to make it appear or disappear on click.
All-in-all, it’s one of those applications that make your OS experience just a tiny bit better; I absolutely recommend it.
You can download it for free from here.
Do you use any applications that improve your OS experience and working environment even by a fraction? Let us know about it!
very cool !
i’d love to run it, but I’m on Lion and it specifically needs Snow Leo to run.
st0rm, unfortunately -as you already stated- it has a system requirement of Snow Leopard or higher. What system are you running? Maybe you could upgrade to Snow Leopard; it’s pretty inexpensive if your system can handle it.
Huh the guy said he has lion why would he ‘upgrade to sl’
Hah, true Twunt; my bad, I misread and thought that he has yet to upgrade from Snow Leopard, let alone have Lion. Sorry about that.
St0rm, you should be able to run SecondBar just fine, considering you exceed the minimum requirements.
Best.
I installed this a day before I found this article. I’m running it on OSX Lion on a macbook pro with 2 additional screens ( 3 total). I think it’s fantastic, though it’s only on one of the additional screens. When is ThirdBar coming out? haha
Dear Tom,
it’s a great app indeed, as for ThirdBar
, you never know.. it may be around the corner!
Cheers!