Wow. What I always liked about MacOS was that there weren't too many menubar icons to begin with. Back in the days of Windows 98, it became typical for every

Wow. What I always liked about MacOS was that there weren't too many menubar icons to begin with. Back in the days of Windows 98, it became typical for every application you installed to make a little icon in the "System Tray". Each app wanted to advertise itself and its (usually useless) features. The System Tray became a dustbin of crap. Eventually windows had to auto-hide them, just like you do with a dustbin. Windows also burdened users with useless notifications, for things like "Battery charged!" and "Battery at 80%", that would constantly distract you. This happened so much that PhDs in Computer Science wrote entire dissertations and approaches to use machine learning to determine the optimal time to interrupt the user with notifications, in an attempt to intelligently unburden users from this nonsense. (http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/hcii/CMU-HCII-06-100.pdf http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/hcii/CMU-HCII-06-...) OSX solved this problem by abstaining from those useless notifications and icons to begin with. They didn't provide an API for app developers to add menubar icons. So few did. But then developers wrote hacks to do so. Now there are so many that they've become a dustbin again, and we need a new app to hide them. It's Windows 98 all over again. Here's an idea -- if you are noticing useless menubar icons, get rid of them. Don't invent a new icon, that has the ability to hide other icons, and then try to come up with a UI (or machine learning system) to discern which icons need to be shown and hidden. Just get the design right in the first place. Ahh... I know I know... Steve Jobs is dead... and now the whole philosophy of getting the design right is a minority opinion. sigh