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I love BitBar and currently have 6 separate tools in my menu bar to keep track of things like Kubernetes instances in various QA environments, local services ru

by thamer 6y ago

I love BitBar and currently have 6 separate tools in my menu bar to keep track of things like Kubernetes instances in various QA environments, local services running on my machine (with stats + start/stop buttons + recent logs), or jobs running on cloud platforms. It's a fantastic tool and I'd encourage anyone who is thinking about building a tiny menubar app in just a few lines of code to look into it.

xtracto 6y ago
Agree, I have it monitoring my AWS consumption cost and ETH prices. Pretty handy.
- mellavora 6y ago
  Would you mind sharing a code example of how you do this? It sounds very helpful
  - kristofferR 6y ago
    Just download xbar, install some plugins through the included plugin browser, and check the source code. It's incredibly easy. If you can echo something in a shell script you can echo it in the menu bar.
  - xtracto 6y ago
    https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/af4de922e9233e084057efcd668084d6 https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/af4de922e9233e084057efcd66... https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/4c8e679bb684f966a654f3aa999628e4 https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/4c8e679bb684f966a654f3aa99... They are pretty handy
    - thamer 6y ago
      I'd suggest checking out jq for parsing JSON files: $ curl -s https://api.coinbase.com/v2/prices/ETH-USD/spot | jq -r .data.amount 1675.55
geoelectric 6y ago
I personally use it just to display the currently playing track on Music--which actually solved a huge gap. It was amazing to me that I couldn't find anything else to do just a basic "track playing" I could always see, without an always-on-top window blocking real estate. It seemed so obvious but nobody was offering that without adding a ton of other crap on top or making an intrusive windowed UI. Then this little script executor with a per-menu output schema worked great. I was able to customize a basic "current track" script that either came with or was around as a plugin/sample and get it working to my exact spec within an hour. What was especially awesome was when I moved to Catalina and the AppleScript targets changed from iTunes to Apple Music and broke automation, I was able to fix it in 30s by editing the script file for the new target name and it just worked. It was great to not have to wait on anyone else. I'll definitely be trying the reboot.

by thamer 6y ago

xtracto 6y ago

Agree, I have it monitoring my AWS consumption cost and ETH prices. Pretty handy.

mellavora 6y ago
Would you mind sharing a code example of how you do this? It sounds very helpful
- kristofferR 6y ago
  Just download xbar, install some plugins through the included plugin browser, and check the source code. It's incredibly easy. If you can echo something in a shell script you can echo it in the menu bar.
- xtracto 6y ago
  https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/af4de922e9233e084057efcd668084d6 https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/af4de922e9233e084057efcd66... https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/4c8e679bb684f966a654f3aa999628e4 https://gist.github.com/obaqueiro/4c8e679bb684f966a654f3aa99... They are pretty handy
  - thamer 6y ago
    I'd suggest checking out jq for parsing JSON files: $ curl -s https://api.coinbase.com/v2/prices/ETH-USD/spot | jq -r .data.amount 1675.55

geoelectric 6y ago

I personally use it just to display the currently playing track on Music--which actually solved a huge gap. It was amazing to me that I couldn't find anything else to do just a basic "track playing" I could always see, without an always-on-top window blocking real estate. It seemed so obvious but nobody was offering that without adding a ton of other crap on top or making an intrusive windowed UI. Then this little script executor with a per-menu output schema worked great. I was able to customize a basic "current track" script that either came with or was around as a plugin/sample and get it working to my exact spec within an hour. What was especially awesome was when I moved to Catalina and the AppleScript targets changed from iTunes to Apple Music and broke automation, I was able to fix it in 30s by editing the script file for the new target name and it just worked. It was great to not have to wait on anyone else. I'll definitely be trying the reboot.