How to Add Icons to Your OS X Menu Bar

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How to Add an Eject Icon (among others)
to Your OS X Menu Bar
Tutorial: Managing Mac OS X Menu Bar Extras

Date Created: 02/12/2006

Last Updated: 02/22/2008

Authors: Jon Accarrino

A Menu Extra in the Mac OS X, is a small icon that appears on the right side of the Menu Bar. For example, check out the image of the Eject icon to the right of this text that's circled in red.

Mac OS X Menu Extras often...

provide a quick and easy way to access common features (chat, sync)

display information (time, email)

control system functions (volume, eject a DVD/CD)

There are lots of third party Menu Extras available. One of my favorites is the Google Notifier which displays email and calendar info in the Menu Bar. According to the image on the right, I haven't checked my Google Calendar in 18 days (oops!) and I have 25 new emails.

People make Menu Extras for everything from monitoring your processor's temperature to the top stories on Digg.com. Britta Gustafson, a Delicious community manager intern, put together a giant list of third party OS X Menu Extras you might want to check out. Before you get lost exploring all the third party Menu Extras available on the Internet, the Mac OS comes built-in with several very helpful Menu Extras such as Bluetooth, Remote Desktop, Airport, Battery, Classic, iSync and Eject.

Here's a tutorial and video demonstration that shows you how to add/delete and rearrange OS X Menu Extras.

Requirements:

Any computer running the Macintosh OS X 10.1 operating system or higher
A tiny drop of common sense

NERD NOTE: I've pointed out the Eject Menu Extra in the title of this article and in many of the images because, believe it or not, the Eject Menu Extra is the most popular. A quick Google search returned over 12,000 results of people looking to add and Eject icon to their OS X Menu Bar.

From the OS X Finder, double-click on your hard drive icon. It's probably called "Macintosh HD" unless you renamed it. In the video below, my hard drive is called "Helo" (a Battlestar Galactica reference) not "Macintosh HD".
Navigate to the Menu Extras folder inside CoreServices:

Macintosh HD > System > Library > CoreServices > Menu Extras
Inside the Menu Extras folder you should see a file called "Eject.menu". Click here to zoom in on the photo.
Double-click on the file named "Eject.menu" and an eject button will magically appear above in your menu bar.
When the Eject icon appears, it may not be in the exact spot you want. To move it around, Command-drag the icon anywhere on the menu bar that you like.

The Command key is the key on your keyboard with the Apple icon. I usually get about 10 emails a month from who don't know this.
Feel free to add as many Menu Extra icons as you want to your menu bar. Some Menu Extras require specific hardware and/or software to operate. For example, if you don't have an Airport card installed inside your Mac, when you double-click on the "Airport.menu" icon nothing will happen.
If you accidentally click on a Menu Extra that you don't want enabled, then Command-drag the icon off the menu bar. It will make a little smoke poof, just like when you drag an icon out of the Dock, and disappear.

Here's a list of the standard Menu Extras that are included with OS X:

AirPort.menu
Battery.menu
Bluetooth.menu
Classic.menu
Clock.menu
Displays.menu
Eject.menu
Fax.menu

HomeSync.menu
iChat.menu
Ink.menu
IrDA.menu
PCCard.menu
PPP.menu
PPPoE.menu
RemoteDesktop.menu

Script Menu.menu
Sync.menu
TextInput.menu
User.menu
Verizon.menu
Volume.menu
VPN.menu

NERD NOTE: Menu Extras, sometimes called "menulets", were introduced with Mac OS X v10.1 to replace Dock extras (docklings), and may thus be viewed as another attempt to bring the control strip from OS 9 to OS X.

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