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Every time I start up Radium the menu bar icon for the application shows up in the same place: dead smack in the middle of all my other menu bar icons. Doesn't matter if it's the last menu bar occupying application I've started.

I'd like to have it appear as the icon furthest to left on account of it displaying song information in the menu bar area once I start streaming a station with it.

Is this possible?

I tried a few key + click combinations to see if that would let me drag it around but no luck. It seems stuck in this position.

Edit: I did try a Command+click to move it -- no luck. Same for Option and Control click combinations.

The image below show the current location of the icon. I'd like it to appear to the left of the Sparrow icon.

Radium menu bar icon

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2 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

If a menu icon is allowed to move, command + mouse select will work.

You might have to patch the program (or System Ui Server). Have you asked the developer if they can implement this as a feature?

Only the Apple icons are movable on my 10.6.7 systems so it certainly isn't easy for a developer to get this working and may be impossible in practice.

The only workaround would be to have a script that delays the radium start as the leftmost item is the last to load. If you had a launch script that slept for 3 minutes and then killed, relaunched that app - it would be leftmost until another started... If it was really important, you could kill and relaunch it periodically every X minutes to ensure that over time it's the leftmost icon without you taking manual action.

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Unfortunately cmd+click doesn't work. Also: Radium is started manually, so well after every other menu bar occupying application has started up. Either OS X or the app seems to remember the menu bar icon's location and place it in the middle every time. – Ian C.♦ Jun 14 '11 at 17:15
I have had issues when the preference that stores the ordering is malformed. Have you tried moving ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systemuiserver.plist to the desktop or the trash and logging out/in again to reset the ordering? – bmike♦ Jun 14 '11 at 18:29
no luck. Still shows up in the same spot on my menu bar. I talked to the dev and he said it's impossible for apps to allow menu bar icons to be moved but he thought starting it last should place the icon last. Oh well. – Ian C.♦ Jun 14 '11 at 20:16
Sorry to hear - I was afraid there was no API to replicate the behavior of official Mac OS X icons in the menu bar. Every system I have access to is amenable to the last launched app showing up on the left - but I don't use any of your apps. Skitch, Twitterrific, Take Five, BusyCal and Screens work well together. I hope you find a cause or workaround. – bmike♦ Jun 15 '11 at 15:19
up vote 2 down vote

While not a free option, the 1.0 release of Bartender allows you to move any menu bar item around, including system items such as the clock, notification center, and the battery indicator.

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