The menu bar is the best real estate on the Mac

The best Mac utilities understand something about attention: the menu bar is prime real estate precisely because it’s ambient. A good menu bar tool is glanceable when you want it and invisible when you don’t. It never demands a window, never bounces in the Dock, never interrupts.

That’s a hard discipline to hold. The temptation is always to add one more panel, one more notification, one more reason to look. The tools that last — iStat Menus, Little Snitch’s status item — resist it. They earn their pixel of your attention by giving back more than they take.

It’s a principle we keep coming back to as we design.