Getting started on Mac: your topics, your feeds
Just installed? The guided setup suggests news, podcasts and videos for your topics and creates one channel for each type, each with its own icon in the menu bar. Then you decide whether to read just in the menu bar or also in the Stream at the edge of your screen. The video shows you how in just under a minute and a half.
On first launch, channelBar for macOS opens the “Welcome to channelBar” window. Four ways lead on from here; for your feeds, pick “Guided feed setup”.
First launch
If you already use channelBar on another device, choose “Pair with an existing installation”: create a pairing code on the device that already has your channels, enter it here and click “Join”. Your channels and feeds then come over by themselves. How “Live values in the menu bar” shows states from Home Assistant or MQTT is covered in a video of its own.
On all your devices
On the right of the window, you’ll find the other apps: channelBar Feeds for iPhone, channelBar TV for Apple TV and channelBar Vision for Vision Pro. A sync group keeps all your devices up to date.
The guided feed setup
Under “Content languages”, the language channelBar runs in is already selected, and news, podcasts and videos are already selected under “Content”. You just pick your topics under “Interests”, in the video “Technology”. Under “Sync”, “With other devices” is already on; turn it off, and the new channels stay on this Mac only.
With “Continue”, you see every suggestion, sorted by type: news, podcasts, videos. Uncheck anything you’re not interested in; “Select all” and “None” apply to a whole type at once.
Creating your channels
With “Create channels”, channelBar creates one channel each for news, podcasts and videos, as long as you kept feeds of that type. For YouTube, the app asks whether you want Shorts – “All Content”, “No Shorts” or “Only Shorts” – and whether it may load the channel logos. To do that, it fetches the channel pages from YouTube; with “Without logos”, you go on without them. You can change the Shorts setting later per feed in the feed settings.
Then it loads all feeds and shows you how far along it is. If a feed fails, it tries again by itself. Once everything is ready, click “Done”: everything that has arrived in the new channels so far counts as read. From then on, only what comes in next is new.
Menu bar or Stream
Now channelBar asks how you want to read: “Menu only for now”, that is, from the menu bar, or also in the Stream, a window with all your messages. You can open the Stream any time later with “Show Stream” in the channelBar icon.
In the video, we choose “Open the Stream with recommended settings”: the Stream snaps to the right edge of the screen, and links open in your default browser. With “Set up the Stream myself”, you choose position, browser and layout yourself; you can change all of it later in Settings.
Click somewhere else, and the Stream hides. Point at the right edge, and it’s back.
What’s next
Up in the menu bar, every channel now has its own icon. You can restart the setup any time from the channelBar icon, under “Setup Assistant…”. New feeds then go into the existing channels of the same name. The next video shows you how to work with the menu bar.