Menu Bar Icon Apps

Update.--I played with Bartender this morning and it does work, although the instructions aren't quite clear or intuitive about how to arrange or rearrange the Menu Bar icons, but once you get the hang of it, it work quite nicely. I'm able to open all my Menu Bar items and then move them to the place I want than where OS-X 10.9.2 puts them.

Original Post.--Well, some things I learned about controlling the order of the icon on the Menu Bar. First, right after you reboot, the icons will, more or less, line up right to left in the order you open them starting to the left of the last icon opened in the startup and your login.

I say more or less because if you have more than a few, some will open in random order the first or second time before lining up last one on the left. If you use the Mac for awhile and have to close then to update or upgrade then, good luck on controlling the order. I never got it to line up right again.

Ok, plan B, menu bar icon applications, eg. MenuBar ReArranger and Bartender. My view of them right now is don't buy them, unless you have a lot of time learning them and getting them to work if you can. I never did get the former to work at all and the latter screwed up the system icon order.

I'm sure you can get Bartender to work but it's not an intuitive application to learn and understand so it's a trial and error method. I ended up closing it and rebooting to regain the system icon order and put the icons I want in the order I want.

What I've also done is reduce the number of applications on the Menu Bar from ~20 of mine, after the last system and login applications, to 4 I use all the time. The rest now I just open, use and close, and I don't care where they open on the Menu Bar since I close them.

The real solution is for Apple to fix what they broke, not just after rebooting, but anytime. I may play with Bartender some more but I need to take a break from yelling at it for not doing what I want and doing things I don't want.