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TZGyn 9b5031aff2 Document the upgrade steps and always print them after a release

Readers and future sessions need one obvious place that says how to move
an installed app to the latest version, and the release flow now requires
surfacing those commands in every release report.

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2026-09-26 23:05:12 +08:00

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SimpleTopBar

A native macOS menu bar app: a hamburger menu in the menu bar whose panel collects every other app's menu bar (tray) icons, plus every app running on your Mac, into three sections:

Menu Bar — a tray of all other apps' menu bar items, discovered through the Accessibility API. Click one to open its real menu. Optionally hide the items from the menu bar so they only live inside this panel (best-effort; see below).
Apps — regular apps that live in the Dock.
Background Apps — accessory/agent apps without a Dock icon. This section is a dropdown: it stays collapsed to a single header, and when you expand it only the first few apps are shown. The rest are hidden behind a Show N more row so the list never overflows the panel.

Click any row to activate the app, or right-click for Activate / Hide / Quit.

Accessibility permission

Collecting and opening other apps' menu bar items needs Accessibility permission (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility). The panel prompts for it; without it the Menu Bar section is empty and everything else still works.

macOS has no public API to move another app's status item. The Hide items from the menu bar toggle uses the spacer technique: a zero-width status item is created at launch whose length is expanded to push the items to its left off-screen. This is reliable only when SimpleTopBar starts at login (its spacer then sits to the right of later-launched apps' items) and may need re-toggling after items move around. It is off by default and always undone on quit; if the app dies, macOS removes the spacer automatically.

Install with Homebrew

brew tap TZGyn/tap https://gitea.tzgyn.dev/TZGyn/homebrew-tap.git
brew trust TZGyn/tap
brew install --cask simpletopbar

The tap is hosted on Gitea, so the full URL is required. Homebrew may print an "Unsupported tap" warning — it's harmless.

Upgrade

brew update
brew upgrade --cask simpletopbar

If Gatekeeper still blocks the app after upgrading (it is not notarized yet):

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/SimpleTopBar.app

Build from source

swift build                 # debug build
swift run SimpleTopBar      # run from terminal (app appears in the menu bar)
swift run SimpleTopBar --self-test   # headless check of the dropdown logic
./build-app.sh 0.2.0        # release build + SimpleTopBar.app bundle + icon + codesign
./release.sh 0.2.0          # build-app.sh + dist/SimpleTopBar.zip + sha256

The background section is collapsed by default. Expanding it reveals AppListModel.backgroundPageSize (5) apps at a time; when more are running a Show N more button reveals the next page. Collapsing resets the page.

Releases

./release.sh <version> builds and zips the app to dist/SimpleTopBar.zip and prints its sha256. Tag v<version>, attach the zip to a release on the Gitea repo, and bump version/sha256 in the cask in TZGyn/homebrew-tap.

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