Feature request: More informative menubar icon

Core Tunnel Request Feature
,
1

The current menubar icon doesn’t say much about what is connected, just that something is connected.

I previously used Shimo which has a tunnel icon, an activity indicator and a number telling how many tunnels are connected.

I suggest adding something similar, maybe a small grid of gray squares that would change to green when a tunnel is connected.

Something you could just glance at and instantly know what is connect and what is not.

What do you think?

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Best regards,
David Jack Wange Olrik

2

Thanks a lot for the suggestion. I’m not quite understand how Shimo present tunnel states, do you have any screenshots to demonstrate your ideas?

3

Here is what Shimo does:

06%20PM

  1. No connection
  2. Connecting, the three dots are animated, with one white, then 2, then 3, then 1 etc.
  3. Connected, one connection active

Any additional connection will increase the number.

My idea was something like this:

tunnels

Where green means connected, red indicates trouble and yellow or pulsating green is connection in progress.

Disregard the tunnel around the grid, the coloured grid is what is most important, from it I can see my 12 favourite connections and their status, even with just a glance.
And by removing the tunnel outline you could fit even more coloured squares, or make them bigger.

4

One other thing on the topic of connection visibility, when you have tagged your connections you have to click the menubar and navigate to each tag to see which connections are active.

Some kind of indicator for each tag would be nice too - e.g 2/3 meaning 2 of 3 connections are active.

5

Accepted :slight_smile: Thanks a lot for the suggestion!

The menu bar icon is small, and most app icons are designed to be greyscale. Instead of menu bar icon, I prefer to add colorful label in dock icon, as in uTorrent.app:

image

6

For stuff that runs in the background, I prefer to turn off the Dock icon, so this won't work for me.

It is possible to do a nice gray scale connection indicator menubar icon, or you could go totally nuts like iStat menus (which I also use) with colours and graphs.

In my opinion a menubar icon should provide useful information to earn its place in my menubar.
I hide all "forced" menubar icon that doesn't provide useful information with Bartender.

7

I’ll be completely convinced :smiley: Thanks a lot for the inspirations. We will improve the menubar icon step by step.

8

I am a user of iStat menus as well as bartender, also little snitch

I like the hover over options for displaying more information of little snitch, and the dropdown to show more details too.

Adding more to the icon would be good too. but wouldn't want it to get over done.