I Cut the Headline Feature. The App Got Better.
My menu bar was a junk drawer.
Dropbox, a VPN, a meeting recorder, a dictation app, a clipboard manager, three things I installed once and forgot. Every app wants a spot up there, and none of them ever gives it back.
For years I kept it under control with Vanilla, a tiny free app that hid the clutter behind a single arrow. Then macOS 27 arrived and it stopped working. The old trick menu bar hiders relied on was gone, and my junk drawer was back.
So I built Tiidy, a menu bar manager for macOS 27. It started as an empty folder on a Saturday and launched five days later, well ahead of the seven-week plan I'd written for it.
The interesting part isn't the speed. It's what I took out. But first, why the old tools broke.
Why menu bar hiders stopped working on macOS 27
Most menu bar hiders, Vanilla included, used the same trick. They added an invisible divider to your menu bar and stretched it very wide. Everything to one side of it got pushed off the edge of the screen, out of sight. Click the arrow and the divider shrank, and your icons slid back.
macOS 27 broke that trick. The divider no longer pushes icons away, so the apps built on it stopped hiding anything.
Tiidy doesn't use a divider at all. It hides icons through a newer system mechanism that macOS 27 still supports, and it works per app, so an app with two icons hides both. If Tiidy ever quits or crashes, the hiding goes with it and your full bar comes back within a couple of seconds. Nothing gets stuck out of sight.
If your hider stopped working after the update, check whether it has shipped a macOS 27 version first. If it hasn't, the trick it relies on isn't coming back.
Every menu bar manager asks you to manage
There are good free menu bar tools already. Hidden Bar, Pelmet, Thaw. They hide icons, and you arrange them yourself. Some let you build rules.
That's the problem I wanted to design out. A tool that hides your icons still hands you a job: decide what goes where, keep deciding, build the rules for the exceptions. You traded a messy bar for a filing task.
Tiidy makes one choice per app and no rules to build. You go through your icons once, one card at a time: keep it, tuck it, or bury it. The target was fifteen icons sorted in under a minute.
After that, the app does the deciding.
Icons that show up when they matter
A tucked icon comes back when the moment calls for it, then leaves again.
Your meeting recorder appears once the mic or camera has been on for a few seconds, and tucks away after the call. Your VPN shows while a tunnel is up. The things you only need at your desk appear when you plug into a monitor. An app you bring to the front brings its icon with it.
Every trigger has a delay built in, because the first version of any signal is noisy. The call rule waits eight seconds before showing and thirty after the call ends before hiding, so a quick mic check doesn't make the bar twitch.
Real life found the edge cases fast. My dictation app uses the microphone all day, so for a while every sentence I dictated summoned my meeting recorder. Now Tiidy ignores dictation apps when it listens for calls. No setting for that. It just knows a dictation app isn't a call.
What runs quietly
The icons you can see were only half the clutter. The other half was everything running without one.
So Tiidy has a Background page. It lists the apps running with no icon at all, heaviest first, with how much memory each is using and a button to quit it. It leaves out browser helpers and Apple's own processes, so you can't break something by tidying.
Below that is everything that starts by itself when you log in: updaters, sync agents, helpers you never asked for. Each one is described in plain words, like "Checks for updates · Runs on a schedule", instead of a file name nobody can read. Stop one and it won't start by itself again. The app still works when you open it, and Start Again puts it back. No password, nothing permanent.
Rarely used apps can also nap. After a few hours untouched, Tiidy quits them, then wakes them the moment you click. In testing, one napping app gave back 81 MB and woke in under four seconds.
At the top of the page, and in the broom's menu, sit three small bars: memory, CPU and disk. They turn orange past 80% and red past 90%. That's it. No graphs, no history.
Those bars went through four versions in a single day: three cards, then one quiet line, then a light panel, then that panel sitting on the page's own paper. The note I kept for the final one: it's a glance, not the point of the page. A tidy tool shouldn't add a dashboard of its own.
What I cut
Here's the part I'm proudest of.
Share-safe. This was the original headline feature: hide everything when you share your screen. It was going to be the hero video. Then the obvious thing sank in: people share a window, not the whole screen. The feature solved a problem that mostly didn't exist. It went.
Keyboard shortcuts and a Find panel. Every utility grows these. Nobody needed them. A click shows the bar and tidies it again.
Searching inside menus. I prototyped it. It worked for four of seven apps, but only by opening their menus on screen to read them. The note I left myself: feasible but not calm. A menu bar tool that flickers menus open is not a tidy menu bar.
Cutting a working feature feels like waste. It isn't. Every feature I removed was one fewer thing to explain, one fewer thing to break, and one fewer reason the app would feel busy. It's the same instinct behind editing out slop: the first version that works is rarely the version that's right.
Honest limits
The other design principle was honesty, which in a utility mostly means being clear about what you won't do.
Tiidy asks for Accessibility access and nothing else. No analytics, no crash-reporting SDK, no account. It only goes online to check for updates and your licence.
macOS 27 won't let any app hide a few system items, like Now Playing, Focus and Live Activities. So Tiidy says so, instead of pretending. When your trial ends, it doesn't hold your bar hostage. It shows every icon, hides nothing, and keeps your layout for when you come back.
Even the website says the free options are fine. The comparison table has a row that reads "Try them first. Honestly." If a US$9 app can't win against free on its merits, a sales page shouldn't be doing the winning.
Five days
I didn't write the code. Thirty years of designing software, and I still don't. I designed, decided and directed; Claude Code did the typing.
That changes where the effort goes. When building is cheap, the expensive part is judgement: which feature earns its place, which edge case matters, what the app should refuse to do. Five days of building left plenty of time for that. It's the same shift I wrote about in AI moved the handoff.
Where it is
Tiidy is at tiidy.app. Seven days free, then US$9 once.
It hides your icons until they matter, and it never asks you to manage it.
The building took five days. The cutting took the design.
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