 Hi, this is Allison Sheridan with the NoCillicast podcast, hosted at podfeed.com, a technology podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, November 5th, 2023, and this is show number 965. After a long hiatus for which I have no excuse, Chichette Across the Pond Light is back with a fabulous interview with Adam Anxt, publisher of the long running internet-based email newsletter, Tidbits. Adam's been on the show a few times and he is always just such a delight to talk to. I told him that after I get off with him, I have more energy. I'm not exhausted after doing an interview. I'm just like energized because he's so much fun to talk to. This episode focused on an article that he published in Tidbits, entitled iPhone Recommendations for Senior Citizens. Now my audience knows I'm an advocate for the accessibility of technology in all forms, and they also know that I bristle at the suggestion that people past a certain age aren't good at technology. If you throw a gender along with that, such as the phrase I hear all too often, it's so easy your mother could do it. And that makes the top of my head blow off. So when I read Adam's article, I had a desire to learn any tips he could provide, making the iPhone more accessible to seniors, but at the same time, I was ready to jump down his throat if he implied that elderly people can't be technically competent. I was delighted to find that he pushed none of my hot buttons and he gave terrific advice. In our conversation, we talk about how to approach senior citizens on what their needs are and understand what their limitations might be. Do they have low vision? Do they have arthritis, cognitive issues, dry fingers? We talk about the pros and cons of face ID versus touch ID as it relates to the different challenges each person might be facing. Adam even gives some cool suggestions on how to rearrange their home screen on the iPhone, including a shortcut that he created that might make communicating with just a few people easier. After you sign up for the Tidbits newsletter, I've included the links to Adam on Mastodon in the show notes and please go listen to Chitchat Across the Pond Lite in your pod catcher of choice. I've written an email to send to my friends and family trying to give them a heads up about pass keys. Now my goal is to tell them not to be afraid of the concept because it really does sound too good to be true. In my email, I'm not going to explain to them the details of how pass keys work, but I wanted them to start noticing where they're being offered and tell them it's okay to give them a try. My other goal is to tell them they don't have to jump in right away, it's okay to wait. Now I thought the text might give you a framework for how to communicate with those whom you support in your personal life. So please feel free to steal this idea and this text and make it your own. As you read it through or listen to it, please let me know and let all of us know if you think I've missed anything fundamental or if I've mischaracterized anything. Maybe you knew a way to simplify what I'm trying to explain even further and let us know if you do. Let me read you the text I plan to send out. The subject of the email is gonna say, pass keys are a good thing. Here's the body of the message. You may start seeing offers from online services to use something called a pass key. The website will make wild promises about how this is our passwordless future finally come to pass and how easy and fun it will be to log in. While this seems too good to be true, believe it or not, these are not scams. Pass keys are a wonderful new technology that will make logging in easier and more secure. As of right now, I've been offered and I am using pass keys to log into Amazon, Best Buy, CVS, Google, eBay and Home Depot. The technology behind pass keys is complicated so I'm not gonna try to explain it here. I have confidence in it partially because the technology has been created by an alliance of the biggest tech companies including Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and OnePassword. The main idea behind pass keys is that it will allow you to teach a website who you are from each device you own, Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, et cetera. And from then on, you won't have to type in your password. You'll use some simple biometrics. I know that sounds crazy or crackable, but it is not. Now the good slash bad news is that if you use pass keys for a service, you can still type in your password if you need to. Websites are still storing and using your password so it still has to be long and strong and not ever used on more than one site. Now each website seems to be enabling pass keys differently so I can't give you a step-by-step instruction on how to enable pass keys. I would suggest that if you're offered to set up a pass key, say yes and follow the instructions the website provides. If this sounds like sorcery and still too good to be true, you're welcome to stick with using your password manager to help you log in for now. You don't have to change the pass keys right away but I just wanted to let you know that they're not a dangerous thing, they're a wonderful thing. I said I wasn't gonna bother you with the nitty-gritty of the technology but if you would like to listen to or read a fabulous explanation of the tech behind pass keys, I highly recommend this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond I recorded with security specialist, Bart Bouchotte entitled Bart Bouchotte's on why Fido pass keys rock. After I posted this letter that I plan on writing to the web, I got quite a few comments from people who said that they're gonna use this for user groups, so they're gonna send it out to their user groups or read it during their user groups and help other people to get the idea that pass keys are not scary and dangerous. When the latest iPads came out, it was obvious that Apple had produced one of their most confusing product lineups since the old Performa days of the 1990s. Some of them have touch ID, some have face ID, some have lightning, some of USB-C and some have the camera on a different side. It's a hot mess. Now when Apple announced the new Apple Pencil USB-C, it took confusion just up that extra layer over the top. Now we have three Apple Pencils, which sounds great, but figuring out which one works with which iPad is a real challenge. If anything, they made the iPad lineup even harder to understand. If you select any device category on the Apple website such as Mac, iPad, iPhone or Apple Watch, you'll see a compare tool in the top black bar. This lets you compare up to three devices side by side to see all of their relative features. If you try this with the iPad, it does work to see three of the five models at the same time, but you can't see all five. If you scroll down, the names of the iPad models you're comparing stay at the top, so it's nice. You can scroll till you see the pencils allowed for each of the three models. To be honest, they did their very best to illustrate the mess that they've created, but it's still very hard to follow. The pencils below each of the iPads are little itty bitty cartoon drawings, so you have to read all of the words below each one. You also have to switch out one of them to see the fourth and fifth iPad models, and then if you're like me, you'll forget what you just read before you change the models. And what if you have an existing Apple Pencil and you want to upgrade your existing iPad? How would you easily use this method to find out the compatible iPad models? I thought maybe if we could start with a specific Apple Pencil on Apple.com, they'd list compatible iPads under it, but they don't. Now, if you're familiar with my work, you know this means it was time for one of my world famous diagrams. I was afraid I might need to go into the fourth dimension to describe this mess, so I limited the information I'd provide to the five current iPad models, their authentication method, Touch ID versus Face ID, and which Apple Pencils worked where. My first attempt definitely illustrates this and it's pretty clear, but it's boring. I put the five iPad models in a horizontal row with a symbol below the models for either Face ID, Touch ID on the home button, or Touch ID on the top button as appropriate. Below each iPad model, the pencil or pencils that work with each model are listed. I use better graphics for the pencils than the cartoons Apple uses on their Compare 4 iPad. Now, it's basically replicating the information on the Apple website, but just the information you need and all five iPad models represented together. Besides being boring though, it's hard to follow. The pencil images in particular are hard to tell apart. The second gen pencil and the USB-C pencil look identical in the images, but the USB-C pencil has a thin line that lets you know you can pull the cap off to get the USB-C port. The first generation is more recognizable because it has that silver band on it and it's round instead of flat. Overall, you do get all of the information you need in one spot and it's not as bad as having to read the pencil names, but it's still not as clear and helpful as I wanted. You can't easily start with a pencil and quickly see which iPads with which iPads it's compatible. Now, my next thought was to draw a Venn diagram. Do you remember those from primary school? That's where you draw circles around different things to demonstrate where there's overlap. The now classic example of a Venn diagram is the one going around the internets that tries to explain the differences and similarities there are between a dork, a nerd, and a geek. Okay, so back to iPads and pencils. I thought I'd be able to plop the images of the five iPads into my favorite free diagramming tool at drawio.com. Then I had to rearrange the pencils around the iPads and I put in the touch ID and face ID images and finally I draw colored boxes that showed where the overlaps were for all of this. While the first diagram was boring, but my attempt at a Venn diagram will make your eyes bleed it so ugly. It has the added feature of being nearly impossible to interpret and answer any of our questions. I included it in the show notes just for completion sake but on top of everything else, this diagram is wrong. My delicate sensibilities couldn't take looking at it long enough to get it right. Obviously I needed to do some more work. I decided to go with a classic flow diagram where I placed the images of the devices on the page and I draw lines between them. Took quite a bit of time to figure out how to rearrange the iPads, pencils, and three different authentication methods in order to make as few lines as possible overlap. While the diagram is excessively complex, it's only complex because the product line is complex. In order to make the diagram accessible to those with color blindness, I made sure to not just use different colored lines but also to use solid dashed and dotted lines. Keep that in mind when you're designing things. Never use just colored to differentiate things or you'll be leaving people out. Now the full diagram is clear and as concise as it can be but it occurred to me that I could easily give you specific diagrams to answer any question you might have. I created layers in my diagram for each of the pencil perspectives and the two authentication methods. I copied only the elements of the diagram that answered that one question. So I was able to create one simple diagram that shows you which iPad support the first generation pencil and what authentication method those have. You can see clearly that you can use the first gen pencil with the ninth gen iPad and the 10th gen iPad. That's the one that you have to use to lightening the USB-C dongle with it and you can see the two different types of Touch ID. I know the idea of a pencil sticking out of the side of your iPad is not ludicrous enough. Adding a dongle is adding insult to injury but think about it. If you already have the first gen pencil and you could use it on a new iPad 10th gen that's a really good thing. Now I did get a comment on this diagram that pointed out that you could really use the first gen pencil on any one of the iPads but it turns out you can't authenticate it so you can't pair it to the iPad, which is kind of weird. All right, next I made a layer for the USB-C Apple Pencil. Right away you can see that USB-C pencil is the most flexible pencil to buy. The iPad Mini, iPad Air, iPad Pro and iPad 10th Gen all can be used with Apple Pencil USB-C. If you have a second gen Apple Pencil your iPad options are actually more limited. When I removed everything that didn't apply to the second gen the diagram shows that you can use it with the Mini, the Air and the iPad Pro models. Once I got this far along the road I figured maybe people who have a preference for a particular authentication method would like to see the diagram from that perspective. I decided not to make separate diagrams for where the Touch ID was located even though I'm sure the diehards would have liked specific home button diagrams. The Touch ID specific diagram is pretty complicated but it includes nearly all of the iPads because the final diagram of just the Face ID iPads has one and only one device on it, the iPad's Pro. I have to tell you, I was astonished when I filtered it down to Face ID that there was only one model of iPad that uses Face ID, the iPad's Pro. You all probably knew that but it was actually a surprise to me. To be honest having used an iPad Pro for many years and having brief dalliances with iPad's Mini I think Touch ID on an iPad is actually a better method. With Face ID I have to lean forward to get my face and view of the camera which causes me to do a partial sit-up and nobody wants that. Anyway, I hope at least one of these diagrams helps you decode the mess that Apple has made of their iPads and pencils. One of the delights of using electronic devices is when you accidentally discover a hidden capability. A few years ago I was hammering away on the keyboard on my Mac and I accidentally hit the semicolon while holding down the option key, out popped and ellipses. Those three periods that are used to convey some missing words in a quote or to transition to a new thought. I use them often as a way to convey a trailing off of my tone. I'm not sure if that's even the right use of it but maybe that's just me. Whether I'm using ellipses correctly or not the Mac keyboard can type all kinds of useful punctuation that you can't find just by looking at the keyboard. While I was listening to a recent Mac Geek Gab they brought up two more useful punctuation marks. Pilot Pete mentioned that you can type a greater than or equal to sign by holding the option key with the greater than symbol. Likewise, less than or equal to can be typed with the option and the less than symbol. These sound obvious once you hear it but I've needed these symbols from time to time and I never found them with the all powerful option key. Inspired on this, I started holding down the option key and tapping around and discovered two more useful ones. If you want a true divided by symbol you know the horizontal line with the dot above and below it hold down the option and the forward slash or is that the backslash? The one down on the bottom right next to the shift I never know which one's which. Anyway, that makes sense, right? Cause they're both used for divide. The other one I've often wanted is the not equal to symbol. By now I bet you found the pattern it's option with equal symbol. Now while these hidden keystrokes are lovely I have trouble remembering them. If you don't want to fill up your brain with all of these keystrokes either you don't have to. Mac OS has a keyboard viewer that lets you interactively view what will be type based on the modifier keys you hold down. Back in the old days the keyboard viewer was super easy to find but I actually had to dig through a lot of support files to figure out where they've hidden the keyboard viewer in Mac OS Sonoma. The only way to get to the keyboard viewer is if first you show what's called input sources in the menu bar. To enable this feature open system settings and select keyboard on the left hand side. You should see under text input a line that says input sources. To the right of that it'll show in gray letters the language you've chosen to use. For example, DE for German or in my case it says US. To the right of that there's an edit button. Well this is really unintuitive because I have no desire to edit the input source but that's where Apple has chosen to play this particular round of their little scavenger hunt. In the unintuitively named edit menu the top toggle says show input menu and menu bar. Once you toggle that on you can close system settings. Now in your menu bar you'll see this very detailed icon that looks like a finder window with the three little buttons in the upper left. It's got some lines of text in the window along with the command symbol. When you select this input sources icon in the menu bar the dropdown gives you the option of showing the emojis and symbols tool or the keyboard viewer. When you open the keyboard viewer you can hold down modifier keys like our beloved option key and then you'll see what the different keys will type. In the screenshot I put in the show notes I held down the option key and you can see that it's slightly highlighted in red. Since the option key is held down you can see less than or equal to, greater than or equal to, divide, the ellipses and not equal and those have all replaced the normal keys you see without the option key. Now as soon as I hold down a modifier key while looking at the keyboard viewer I have trouble remembering which key is showing the character I want. So I just toggle the modifier key on and off, on and off, on and off until I can remember the key combination to get to my desired punctuation. After you enable the keyboard viewer I highly recommend holding down the different modifier keys just to familiarize yourself with what's available. Don't forget to try option shift as well. One of the keystrokes I can never remember is how to type the Apple logo. I'll leave it as an exercise for the student for you to figure out how to type it using the keyboard viewer. Ooh, I just found another one. Option shift two is how to type the Euro symbol. Now why wasn't that option shift dollar? That would be good, but at least now we know we can find it with the keyboard viewer. Now I mentioned that the modifier key you hold down will be slightly highlighted in red while looking at the keyboard viewer, but you'll also notice that several of the keys have orange boxes around them. These are very special keys and I'll explain by example. Where the E key is normally, with the option key held down you'll see an accent going up and to the right. And the key is highlighted in orange. If you wanna type this accent character above a letter you hold down the option key while typing the letter E and then you follow it with the letter over which you want the accent. It's quite common to put this accent above the letter E so you type option E followed by E again and you get E with the accent. By the way, one of the few things I remember from high school French class is that this accent is called an accente U or acute accent. Get it? Is it acute angle, acute accent? I love that. Now umlat is another accent that's useful in German and I imagine some other Germanic languages. The umlat is common over both the letter U and the letter O, which you can type with option UU and option UO. Now that might sound funny, you might have thought it'd be option OO, but the umlat is over the U key when you hold down the option key. So it's option UO to put the umlat over the U. Now I'm betting a lot of you are hollowing at your devices right now that there's no need to know any of this because nowadays you can just hold down the E or the U or the O on your keyboard and macOS will offer you all of the available accents. True, but if I told you that first, I never would have been able to combine a story of high school French and geometry. I mentioned earlier that it used to be a lot easier to launch the keyboard viewer. In macOS we have a pane called the character viewer that you can launch by tapping the globe icon on your keyboard. It might just come up with emoji, but you can also see the full suite of emoji and symbols by tapping the icon in the upper right. Guess what that icon in the upper right looks like? It looks exactly like the input sources icon we just enabled in the menu bar. It now simply does this toggle back and forth between just emoji and emoji and symbols, but in the old days that icon would open the keyboard viewer. It's fascinating to me that they still use the same icon, but now they have two different meanings for this icon. Now, since we've lost that feature, I wonder if maybe there was some key combination I could use to invoke the keyboard viewer to come up and I found a very clever workaround to make that happen. So instead of adding the input menu, there is a way to get the keyboard viewer to come up with a keystroke. In the macOS subreddit, contributor Roma H explained that in the old days there were two redundant keyboard viewers, the one I used to invoke and the accessibility keyboard. Roma went on to explain that starting in Catalina, they eliminated the extra one. So the keyboard I've been describing is actually the accessibility keyboard relabelled as the keyboard viewer. Better yet, Roma explained how you can use an accessibility shortcut to open and close the keyboard viewer. It's a bit convoluted and if you already use the accessibility shortcut for other things, you might not want to enable it for this. The steps Roma outlined are as follows. Go to system settings, accessibility and on the left you can go down to shortcut. Then you'll see a list of check boxes. I check all of them except for one, accessibility keyboard. Once you have only one, there's no need for the list of accessibility options to come up when you trigger the shortcut so it'll go to just the one you've selected, in our case, accessibility keyboard. By default, command option F5 will now launch the keyboard viewer. If you want to change the shortcut, you can go to system settings, keyboard shortcuts and select accessibility on the left. You can then customize the show accessibility as options shortcut to a combination of your choosing. All right, now I've given you three pass or maybe four to help you figure out how to type fancy punctuation and other symbols on the Mac like the Apple logo. I hope one of these methods works the way your brain thinks. This week, Michael Westbay became a new supporter of the Podfeat podcast via Patreon. I'm floored by his generosity and as I told him, I will endeavor to be worthy of his continued support. If you'd like to be awesome like Michael, please consider going to podfeat.com slash Patreon to pledge your support. I think the first time I talked about the wonderful menu bar app organizer bartender was in January of 2014. When I do my annual new compave, bartender is on the top list of critical apps I install first. It also has a warm place in my heart because it reminds me of the gone too soon Tim Verporten on the Mac review cast when he told us about so many awesome menu bar apps that he said, some would should event a menu bar app to manage them. Over the last nine years, bartender just gets better and better. In 2021, bartender four was a huge step forward. And now in 2023, we have the newly released bartender five from MacBartender.com. If you're already a bartender fan and you have not yet upgraded to Mac OS Sonoma, it's important to know that bartender four does not run under Sonoma. You'll need to upgrade to bartender five. If you already own bartender four, you'll be eligible for upgrade pricing probably. And if you bought it from July 2022, then you get a free upgrade. If you don't yet own bartender, it's only $16 and it comes with a free four week trial. In this day and age of subscription pricing, it's refreshing to have a single price to pay. Now that we have the pricing out of the way, let's talk about the cool new features. Bartender's main purpose in life is to let you have a secondary menu bar told all the menu bar items that you don't need to access frequently. You may also have apps that have menu bar icons, but you simply never view those apps in this way. And bartender lets you keep those always hidden. By hiding things you don't need often, bartender reduces confusion in the main menu bar. It's also a critical tool if you're using a laptop with limited screen real estate. To see the secondary menu bar, also called the bartender bar, you can choose to have it show when you hover over the empty space in your menu bar or when you click on the bartender icon. Bartender five now allows you to create menu bar item groups. With groups, you can have a single icon that's always visible or in the bartender bar, but when you hover or click on the icon, you get a little dropdown of just the items in that group. Now this would probably be more clear with an example. When you open bartender to the menu bar items tab, you'll see the familiar, shown, hidden, and always hidden sections. You drag and drop the menu bar icons up and down between those three sections. Below that you'll find the menu bar items palette in which you'll find two little lozenges, he calls them. Add a spacer or add menu bar item group. If you drag the add menu bar item group lozenges up into the shown or hidden bar, you'll get a new window allowing you to customize this group. First you get to create the icon and or title you'd like to have for your group. The icon options are from what are called SF symbols that says those tiny black and white graphics. All menu bar icons are black and white now and I think it makes it significantly harder to tell them apart. For that reason, I don't choose any of the SF symbols for my menu bar item groups. The real fun comes if you choose the emoji button instead of adding text. Let me explain with an example. I really like I step menus from Bejango, but there's so many nifty graphs to monitor about my system that they end up taking up a lot of space in my menu bar. Making them a group is the perfect solution. In the emoji picker, I searched for graph and I found a colorful little bar graph that's perfect for my I step menus group. I can actually tell it apart from all the other icons. In creating a menu bar item group, I think it's handy to switch on the toggle that enables you to simply hover over the icon for your group to instantly reveal the contents. The next step is to drag the menu bar items up into your group. Once you've created the group, remember to remove the same items from the normal menu bar or you're gonna see all of those twice. I'm excited about menu bar item groups and bar tender five to keep my smaller laptop screen uncluttered and the items actually easier to find. One of the other ones I created was a cloud icon, a cloud emoji I should say, and then I can put all of my cloud based services under those so I can never remember which one is, I'm always looking around like where's Dropbox, where's Google Drive, where's iCloud, whatever. Now I can have them all under a single icon. Bar tender five now gives us flexibility in the styling of our menu bars. The first thing you'll find in the menu bar style tab is the option to add a tint. You'll see this non-descript wide empty lozzage. If you tap on it, it'll bring up the traditional color palette. When you choose a deep, rich color, don't be surprised when the menu bar does not turn that color, it just tints the menu with that color. If you're fancy, you can even add a gradient to the menu bar. The button is labeled add color stop for gradient, which will add a little circle at each end of the color lozzage. Tap on one of the circles to change the color at that end. It can make a very pleasing effect or you can successfully create garish combinations that clash terribly with your chosen desktop wallpaper. You can even add more gradient stops to add more flare. You can add a border to your menu of color and thickness of your choice and a nice drop shadow to set it off. But this border is just gonna be a horizontal line under your entire menu bar. For me, the real fun of styling the menu bar is the next session. If you toggle on the switch for rounded menu bar, you'll notice that the two ends of the menu bar are now rounded, forming a long rounded rectangle. Wait, it gets even better. The second toggle, rounded separate sides, does something magical. The left menus next to the Apple logo and the right menus near the time become completely separate menu bars with their own rounding. Looks really, really cool. And it highlights that these have always been two different menu bars. Note that the rounded menu bar and rounded separate sides are kind of inverse toggles. If you flip one on, it flips the other off. Now, if that isn't enough styling, you can also round the corners of your display if it's not already rounded. You can round just the top, just the bottom, or toggle them both on for a fully rounded rectangle experience. If you aren't using the rounded menu bar or rounded separate sides, it makes for a very pleasing look to have the screen rounded on all four corners. If you do have the menu bar rounded, I find it a bit unsettling that the diameter of the rounding menu is slightly different than the rounding of the display, so you see a little sliver of the display up in the corners. That's literally the only thing I can complain about with bartender five. There's one more toggle in this section that might provide an improved experience for you. If you're like Brett and you're bothered by the camera notch on your laptop, toggle on below menu bar. This toggle puts a black bar across the top, under the menu bar, and also rounds the top of the display below the menu bar. It's kind of hard to explain, but it makes the menu bars feel like they're floating above the main screen and everything looks very finished off and you can no longer see the notch. With this many toggles to play with to control the look and feel of your menu bars, you're bound to find a combination that you find pleasing. If you do so many changes to your menu bars and you're experimenting that it's a hot mess and you wanna start over, there's a reset menu bar button at the bottom of the menu bar style tab. You'll also see a button that says apply to all menu bars. This is a hint of another feature of bartender five. By default, your modifications to the style of bartender apply only to the current display. This is awesome because it's quite likely that you might want a different style for the menu bar on a small laptop display than your larger external display. Okay, enough fooling around with the aesthetics of your menu bars, let's get back into the power bartender five brings to you. We now have presets. If you're anything like me, you have different contexts in which you work. For example, when I'm recording a podcast, I need to have quick access to some very specific menu bar apps. But when I'm recording for screencasts online, I need to have the absolute minimum number of menu bar items showing during the recording to create a distraction-free video. To create a preset, you select the giant plus button. In the pop-up menu, you can name the preset and even add a description. In my example, mine would be called recording and in the description, I could list the menu bar apps that will show if this preset is chosen, such as audio hijacks, sound source, do not disturb, and logitune to control my lights webcam. Next, you have the same three areas we see in the main interface of bartender, shown, hidden, and always hidden. Makes sense, right? Below that, you can add a spacer or add a menu bar items group, just like the normal settings for bartender. Once you have your preset set up, you'll see it in a list on the preset tab along with any others you've created. You can tap the button to apply a preset and you can modify it by double clicking or tapping settings. In the upper right, you'll see a button to remove the applied preset to go back to your default. Now you don't have to launch bartender settings to switch between presets. Simply right click on the bartender icon in your menu bar and the dropdown menu gives you access to changing presets. Here's a big caution about using presets. If you have a preset enabled and then you go back to the menu bar items tab where you create your defaults, you'll see a warning. It shows you the name of the currently applied preset with a button to remove applied preset. Below that is an explanation of why you need to remove the applied preset. It says, changes made here when a preset is applied will not be saved to the default menu bar layout or the preset. To a more colloquial language, you're spitting in the wind here if you make any changes to the defaults while a preset is applied. It's not changing the preset and it's not changing the default menu bar. I think this is a big enough notification to catch your eye but if you forget or don't notice, you'll enjoy what Bart likes to call spooky action at a distance where changing something doesn't affect what you think it should. Presets are super powerful and give you granular control over the different contexts in which you might work, but the best tools let you automate the switching of contexts. Rather than worrying you're a pretty little head about remembering to switch presets when you change context, Bartender can change your menu bar based on triggers you define. The triggers tab looks a lot like the presets tab with a giant plus button inviting us to add a new trigger. You're invited to name it and then choose how you want the menu bar to change when this trigger is fired. If you've gone to all the work of creating a preset, you can choose to activate a preset from a pull down but you can also simply select menu bar items to include with this trigger. This selection method seems simpler than the normal method of dragging icons up and down between shown, hidden and always hidden. You get a simple list of every menu bar item that's currently available to you with the icon of the real app, the name and the frustratingly black and white icon for the menu bar item itself. So it's super easy to figure out which one's which. Check off all the ones you wanna show and tap done. Easy peasy. Next you need to add the trigger condition. You can trigger on an app, battery status, location, time, by script or by wifi. If you choose to put trigger by an app, you can decide whether simply being open is when the menu bar will change or whether you only wanna change when that app is in the front window. I suspect the second option might be disorienting as you switch apps when working but there might be a case where that's valuable. Now back to my recording example, podcast recording normally requires my lighting which is controlled by an app called Logitune. This means that just the fact that Logitune is open could trigger my recording preset to be enabled. Now here's something interesting I learned and talked to Ben, the incredibly responsive developer of bartender. I just finished telling you that you can have your menu bar change to a preset you've created or you can select the menu bar item specifically for this trigger. He explained that you can actually do both in the same trigger. Here's an example where combining these options might be handy. One of the things that drives us crazy with our devices is constantly watching our battery indicators. I'm convinced that watching it actually drains it. Hey, maybe that's why my MacBook Pro loses batteries. But anyway, I digress. If you really wanna watch your battery when it's low but you wanna lower your stress, you could set up a trigger to enable your standard preset when the battery of your MacBook is above 30% but below 30% it adds that one icon to your menu bar. If you want to have one set of menu bar items when you're at work and one for when you're at home, you can use a location trigger. It brings up a little map with your current location shown but it's zoomed way out. In my case, I could see more than one state at the default size. You then pinch and zoom around until you've got the area you want to trigger a change. Tap the update trigger region and a circle of maybe a mile or two will be drawn around that area. By default, the trigger fires when you're inside the circle but you can change it to when you're outside the circle. I could see a simple setup where your menu bar looks one way at home and as soon as you leave your neighborhood, you want it to change. Setting triggers by Wi-Fi condition is several different options. You can set it to fire when connected to any Wi-Fi network, when disconnected from all Wi-Fi networks or connected or disconnected from a specific Wi-Fi network. This might be an easier way to define a trigger based on whether it work or not. Another cool use of this option would be to set it so that when you're not connected to your own Wi-Fi network, be sure to show your VPN software's icon in the menu bar. If you're a script kitty, you might enjoy using a script to trigger a change to your menu bar. I'd love to hear your story if you think up a useful script to trigger a change in your menu bar items. In version four of bartender, you could define some hotkeys, but they're just enough different bartender five that they're worth mentioning. You could define hotkeys to show hidden items, which you had before. You can also set a hotkey to hide the left application menu. So if you've got a small screen or you've got the resolution set, particularly low to accommodate your vision, or you wanna see a lot of menu bar items at the same time, be able to hide the application menu on the left might be the only way to see them. Like some of our other modifications, hiding the left application menu only affects the screen you have selected, not both displays. You can set up a hotkey to show all menu bar items and do a quick search of menu bar items. I always forget that there's a search capability in bartender. I find myself scanning back and forth, back and forth, hovering over each icon, trying to find the one I'm looking for. You can use a hotkey or if you right click on the bartender icon in the menu bar, you can also trigger a search from there. I really need to remember that. You can also set a hotkey to navigate your menu bar items using just the keyboard. This may be your cup of tea if you truly hate to remove your hands from the keyboard. With a hotkey for keyboard navigation, it selects the first menu bar item and highlights it in blue. You then use the arrow keys to move from left to right to get to the desired menu bar item. To interact with that menu bar item, you hit the enter key, then use the down arrow to navigate to the control within the menu bar app you want to manage, and again, use enter to invoke the command. Now, I'm often guilty of overcomplicating my descriptions of simple things, but this one is just as time-consuming to execute as it was for me to describe it. If you need to get to a menu bar item that's in the hidden menu bar bartender bar, you have to arrow over to the bartender icon, enter to open the hidden items, then arrow from left to right to get to the one you want, hit enter, down arrow, and enter again. Again, maybe this is your cup of tea, but I probably won't take advantage of keyboard navigation in bartender five. What I very well might take advantage of is the option to add hotkeys to invoke specific menu bar items. I'm gonna set one of mine to open sound source from Rogue Amoeba. I'm constantly going in and out of sound source to toggle between my headphones and my speakers for audio out. You may be thinking, Allison, you have a stream deck. Why don't you just assign a button to toggle between those two settings? Yes, that's a grand idea and I've tried that multiple times. Every time I try to do it, it works for a couple of days. I literally just rebuilt a bunch of my stream deck settings three days ago when a big upgrade came through and a messed a bunch of them up and I was delighted to get my audio output toggle working again and it's broken again today. Anyway, using the menu bar items hotkey section, I can use the button at the bottom to add a menu bar item hotkey for sound source, select the menu bar item from a list and assign the hotkey. You can choose to have this hotkey left or right click or use left or right click with the option key. The last option is to just show the item and that's a great way to bring up a hidden menu bar item with a keystroke so you have quick access to it. Finally, we've got an advanced tab with a few useful controls. We can tell bartender to reduce energy usage on battery, change the delay before hiding temporarily shown menu bar items, show notifications and to show all sections when command dragging items. You can set whether to check for updates automatically and if you wanna live on the wild side you can allow updates to include test builds even though they might be unstable. Now I've buried the lead on my single favorite feature bartender. I've been planning it for a long time to put in a feature request to Ben asking him if when settings opened could it please open to the menu bar items tab instead of general. My logic was that the general tab is where you set things up once and for all at the very beginning and the fun was all in the menu bar items tab. Before I got around to ask him for this change Ben released bartender five and he did one better than my request. Settings open to whichever tab you opened last. I know this sounds like a silly thing but if you're testing a bunch of different style changes or maybe setting up presets and triggers you might wanna close settings for a bit to see how you like your changes and then open it back up and make some tweaks. Makes me so happy that it opens right where I was working. The bottom line is that bartender five is a terrific upgrade and well worth the low price to do the upgrade or even to buy it from fresh. It's only $16. Now it may dismay you that your old version of bartender won't run under Mac OS Sonoma but for such a small price the upgrade is definitely worth it. If you don't own bartender yet rush over to macbartender.com and get bartender five. You'll be glad you did. All right that's gonna wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at alisonapodfeed.com anytime you like. I need some content for you so please send in your reviews to alisonapodfeed.com. Gonna need some help for Thanksgiving week for sure. If you have question or suggestion you can send that on over too. You can follow me on mastodon at podfeed at chaos.social. Remember everything good starts with podfeed.com. If you wanna join in the conversation you can join our Slack community at podfeed.com slash slack where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely no-silicast ways. You can support the show like Michael Westbay at podfeed.com slash Patreon or with a one-time donation at podfeed.com slash PayPal. And if you wanna join in the fun of the live show head on over to podfeed.com slash live on Sunday nights at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic no-silicast ways. Thanks for listening and stay subscribed.