Control third-party menu bar icon order via Automator

Jan 08, '10 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I have a few applications launch on start up that include menu bar icons (Delibar, Dropbox, Adium, etc). I noticed their placement in the menu bar related to their on-boot order. Even when ordered them in my preferred order in the Login Items tab of the Accounts System Preferences panel, I couldn't get the icons to come out in that order due to application launch times.

Tonight I created a simple Automator script that adds a pause (the Pause action in the Utilities (10.6) or Automator (10.5) Library) before launching an application. For example, I added a seven-second pause before launching Dropbox, so that it's menu bar icon would load after that of Delibar.

I then call the delayed launcher(s) in the Login Items panel to control the load order.

[robg adds: Another alternative, as covered in this hint, is to put all of your login items into an AppleScript, and use timing and order in that AppleScript to control launch order.]

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