The menu bar on Mac: headlines in one click
Up in the menu bar, every channel has its own icon, and the red number shows how much is new. One click opens its feeds with all their headlines, a right-click marks a message as read without closing the menu, and anything that can wait goes to “Consume Later”. The video shows you how in under two minutes.
In channelBar for macOS, every channel has its own icon up in the menu bar; after the guided setup, for example, one each for news, podcasts and videos. The red number on the icon shows how many unread messages are waiting for you.
Feeds and headlines
Click an icon to open the channel’s menu. Channels bundle feeds, and each feed gets its own row here, with its logo and its number of unread messages. Bold text means there’s something new.
Point at a feed, and its messages fold out, newest on top. Point at a message to see when it arrived, which feed it’s from and where its link goes, without opening a window. At the very top are “Mark as Read” and “Consume Later”.
Read and check off
Clicking the message opens the article in your browser and marks it as read. For a podcast episode, the click starts playback instead.
Just skimming? A right-click marks the message as read, and the menu stays open. The number next to the feed goes down. Right-click a feed’s row to mark all of its messages as read at once.
At the top of the feed is “Mark All as Read”. One click, and the whole feed is done; the number in the menu bar drops, too. For the whole channel, you’ll find the same row at the bottom of the channel menu.
“Consume Later”
No time for an article right now? Point at the message and click “Consume Later”. As soon as you’ve saved something, the channelBar icon shows “Consume Later”: everything you’ve saved is there, sorted by channel, with a count for each. The same spot in the message takes it out again.
Order and compact mode
You decide the order of the icons: hold down the Command key and drag an icon to its new spot. channelBar remembers the new order.
Short on space in the menu bar? In the channelBar icon, “Enable Compact Mode” turns compact mode on. The channels move into this one icon, and its number adds up everything new. One click shows all channels in a list, each with its full menu. With “Disable Compact Mode”, every channel gets its own icon back.
Which channels move in is up to you, in each channel’s settings under “Menu Bar”, at “Compact Mode”: “Never”, “When active” – the default – or “Always”, which keeps the channel in the channelBar icon even without compact mode.
A channel’s settings
At the bottom of every channel menu, “Settings…” takes you to that channel’s settings. That’s where you set the icon, the number and the layout; the video on setting up channels shows you how. We’ll show you the Stream and podcasts in separate videos.