I upgraded my Macs to macOS Sonoma a few weeks ago. While everything has been uneventful, the Bartender app pinged me one too many times about upgrading to Bartender 5, which has several Sonoma-only features.

Last year, I looked forward to upgrading Bartender until their recent botched communication and messaging regarding the purchase of the app.

Oliver Andrich’s Week 23: An Almost Perfect Week was the nudge I needed to go ahead and switch over to Ice, which is an open-source menu bar manager for macOS.

The upgrade took less than a minute, and the app worked the same way Bartender did for me. I changed the menu icon to an ellipsis to match what I had the Bartender app set to, and everything worked.

Previously