Bartender for Golden Gate Releases

The first alpha of Bartender for macOS 27 is available now. This first build is a slimmed down version of Bartender to get you back up and running on macOS 27, and we'll work on restoring more functionality over the beta period. Stability will improve over each beta of Bartender, and we'll aim to ship a build for every new beta that Apple ships too.

This preview is specifically for users on macOS 27, and will not function at all on previous versions of macOS.

This version of Bartender is entirely free to use, excluding Pro features.

Moving items in your bar should work better than ever, as should hiding/showing them. Bartender Bar will currently show icons of apps instead of the actual menu bar icon. Our goal is to restore full functionality before macOS 27 ships to the world this fall.

Bartender can now also function with no screen recording at all.

Due to more unrecoverable changes from Apple, we won't be able to maintain previous profiles ( yet ). If you're using on-demand mode, your default profile should remain roughly the same as it was before. We're aiming to recover these profiles in future with a migration step, and are not removing your underlying profiles.

Preview Changes

• Bartender no longer touches your mouse to move items. It only interacts with the mouse when you activate an item via Bartender Bar.
• Bartender Bar will show where your mouse is when you click/hover.
• The menu bar background used in the layout pages and Bartender Bar will update less frequently, so if you're rotating desktop backgrounds a lot, this may be slightly out of date.
• Bartender should now index your menu bar substantially faster than on previous versions of macOS.
• Individual item moves should now be performed faster than ever.
• Bartender Bar will show icons of apps, i.e. the ChatGPT icon, instead of the actual menu bar item. When these items are clicked, they will show the real icon in the bar.
• When clicking an item in Bartender Bar, the autohide timer should now always respect if the item has its own menu presented, and delay hiding it.
• Clicking or hovering in the menu bar will show Bartender Bar underneath the actual point you clicked, instead of always at the end.

Disabled Features

These features are currently disabled, but will return in a future update.

• Profiles
  • A basic version of profiles is available inside the layout page.
  • Your profile may not line up exactly with previous settings due to system changes. If you were using on-demand layout, it will likely work correctly.
  • We are working on restoring these, however, running this alpha will ignore your previous profiles for now.
• Triggers
• Widgets
• Live Mode

Known Issues

• We haven't localized the new strings yet.
• The menu bar item won't respond whilst we're indexing the bar, give it a sec and you can right click it again.
• Behaviour on a MacBook with a notch is not fully stable, but should behave roughly as expected on monitors.
  • We've tested this a lot on various MacBooks, but there's some odd behaviours with the new system overflow options.
• Some system items, especially those from Control Center widgets, cannot be hidden, but they can be moved.
• Hiding items from apps with multiple bar items will hide them all, as will showing them.
• Triggers are currently disabled, but will return in a future build.
• Only on-demand layout is currently enabled; Live Mode will return in a future build.
• The Shortcuts menu item will be labelled as "Control Center" and can't currently be moved.
• You may have to tap "Allow Access" twice on the onboarding prompt for screen capture permissions for it to work.
• Users with very large bar item counts may see some slowdown on the first run, but faster indexing after that.
• When your items are overflowing, it's possible that the menu item preview will show an incorrect image.
• It's possible for the menu items to drift slightly from the live layout - there's a temporary manual refresh button to handle this
• After moving enough items, the menu bar stops responding. This will likely be fixed in a future macOS beta, but we've got a "Restart Menu Bar" button to fix it in the imterim.