Get the blank icons. You’ll need this ZIP to make the Dropbox icon vanish.
Get the originals so you can undo things. This is a copy of the icons you are about to overwrite.
The idea is simple. Replace the icons that Dropbox uses in the menu bar with some blank images. The video explains exactly how to do it.
Oh, and I should mention that this little video was pretty much created for minimalmac.com. I actually like to keep my Dropbox icon visible ;)
Surprisingly, I did this last year. I never really released it to the net though. Guess I should have.
I think I assumed others would have figured it out also.
:)
Yeah, I’m not exactly breaking new ground with this. But some people just wouldn’t want to dig around their app package. And having the replacement images pre-made and pre-named will make it easier for people who want to do this as simply and easily as possible.
Erik
I actually submitted the same exact method to minimalmac but you outdid me with the video. Very well done.
People should note this can be done for any program, just replace the relevant icons to transparent pngs. I did this for typinator before they had a hide menu icon option.
Great video!
Thanks Lisa. Screenflow is fun :)
Thanks for the tip. I had a reservation of replacing all of the icons as I would no longer know the status or if there was a problem.
I only replaced the idle.png and logo.png files and now only see an icon if there is a problem or when files are being updated.
Great post! That has been driving me nuts forever.
I actually went ahead and did the same thing for all the other apps in my menu bar. A whole lot less clutter, but still all the same function.
Cheers
Erik-
I’m curious as to whether or not this adjustment in the menu bar has been tried within the new Snow Leopard? I know that people changing menu bar options (ie. color of the menu Apple icon) inside Leopard have had no problems, but the same modifications in Snow Leopard rendered their computers desktop unusable. Thoughts?
Brad,
I made this screencast on Snow Leopard and it worked fine.
Erik
Thanks Erik for the tutorial. I also like to keep my Dropbox icon in the menu bar, but with your tutorial, I succeed to change some of the other icons so I have now a nicer and cleaner system menu bar.
Here’s my post about how to keep your OS X menu bar nice and clean.
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The problem with this solution is that now everytime i turn dropbox on, it ask me if i allow it to conect…is there some fix to this?
@Gerardo;
I’m having the same issues over here, were you or anyone able to find a fix?
I’ve used a similar technique in the past, except instead of regular full-size, err, full-width icons… I kept the height of the png the same, but made the width just a couple px wide. this way, if an app loads in the menu bar before another that I do want to keep, it won’t show a space between them where the “hidden” one is ghosted with a clear png. I’m not sure if it works as well now, as it has been a couple years since I tried it, but it made for a much less busy menu bar… of course, when I did it that way, I was assuming I had access to that app’s prefs and other input via other methods; dropbox does not let you, so the icon up there is necessary to at least be wide enough to catch with a mouse.
thanks a lot, i also replaced it since it can get a little crowdy and it’s really annoying to not be able to move nor remove that icon, i just replaced the logo and the idle png’s so i can find out if something is wrong or if it actually works
Thank you very much. I really like having the menu bar empty.
I do this every time I install OS X in any computer (quite often nowadays), and I couldn’t find time to thank you until now.
My pleasure! Glad it’s been useful.
Nice, thanks for this. They really should provide an option to hide it.
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Yea! My Menu Bar is finally clean.
Hey, could you post a tutorial on how to do this but for the Skype 5 menubar icon? Thanks! I’ve tried to do it, but after moving a renamed transparent .png into skype’s resource folder in place of the original, Skype won’t open! The green icon drives me crazy…
Harrison, You don’t have to do any of that for Skype, you can just turn off the menu bar icon.
Skype>Preferences>General>Show staus in menu bar
Uncheck that option.
Dropbox just updated, and the icon names have changed. They are still in the same Resources folder, but all of the original names are now preceded with ‘dropboxstatus-’. So, you can still use Erik’s icons, but they need to be renamed.
Thanks!