BarKit menu bar apps

In this new agentic era, anybody who knows how to computer is empowered to modify their machine to their unique needs. BarKit is my macOS menu bar toolkit that has let me create a dozen tools I use every day.

BarKit

the kit itself

What I've made with it

Latte

Latte is a companion app for the Espresso brand of portable displays.

I found their official Flow companion app bloated and unintuitive, so I made my own with a better experience for my own use cases.

Primarily it enables easy-access to key settings: Brightness, rotation, position are all a single click away or configurable with hotkeys. Most importantly for my use: It lets you match your Apple display brightness, syncing Espresso and MacBook display brightness (complete with calibration for different nit ranges). No more changing the displays independently.

Rotary

Rotary is a audio input manager for the Native Union Pop Phone. By default, the Pop Phone is a dumb speaker and mic I/O device in a fun form factor. The twist is it has a single, non-configurable button on it! Rotary coordinates with Karabiner Elements to let you customise the button, and also supports macro integrations with other apps.

My use case: The button triggers Whispr Flow while temporarily swapping to the Pop Phone for mic input. It's my less awkward equivalent to the whispering gooseneck or lavalier microphones everyone in San Francisco is seemingly using.

Ripcord

Ripcord is a quick-eject tool for drives connected to your Mac.

In my journey of backing up my data with the 3-2-1 rule, I've ended up with an expansion drive and a Time Machine drive always plugged into my home USB-C dock. But now, to take my laptop anywhere I have to open Finder and safely eject both. Ripcord lets me one-click eject multiple drives at once so I don't have to fiddle around when I need to leave 5 mins ago.

Fleet

The most complicated app in the suite, Fleet is a centralised device manager for connected phones or tablets.

I have a range of phones and iPads I've collected through the years (shoutout Lyndal and Sam for donations). My current list includes 2x Android phones, an iPhone 5s, SE, XS, 14, 15 Pro, and iPads. I much prefer on-device testing of sites and apps to get the true feeling of how my designs perform.

I've previously managed it all with an agents SKILL.md that had device ID's and instructions, but it was never quite consistent. Fleet lets you manage and enroll devices in a single place, and orchestrate multi-device actions: screenshots, opening web pages, installing or opening apps, changing settings, etc.

So now I can set up my human test environments myself, or an agent can easily set it up for me with Fleets MCP.