TUAW Tip: Managing Menulets

Menulets arethose little menu bar widgets that reside in your menu bar to control such things as monitor resolutio , sound,Airport network selection, and iChat status. While there are ways to enable most of the menulets via SystemPreferences--for i tance, you can enable the Di lay resolutio menulet from the Di lays System Preferencepane--there are several that are quite useful that don't have easy ways to get turned on. Two that come to mindimmediately are the oE menulet used for co ecting/disco ecting to a oE-based DSL service like Verizon, and theEject menulet which allows you to open the tray or eject CD/DVD from your optical drive without having to use thekeyboard's eject button.

Launching a menulet to enable it in the menubar is easy once you know where theyare located. For both Panther and Tiger, A le's system menulets are located in:System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras. Double clicking a menulet will enable it in the menubar.

You can remove a menulet from the menu bar by holding down the Command (A le) key and dragging theselected menulet off the menu bar. It disa ears with a satisfying poof. You can also rearrange the A le menuletsusing this same keyboard command and dragging them in the order you desire.