Thaw

18 September 2026

After updating to macOS 27 Golden Gate, my old version of Bartender 5 stopped working - it got stuck on the screen recording permission, even though I had added it in System Settings.app.

Anyway, figured it was time to stop using Bartender 5 (which I had purchased in October 2023), so it served me well. I thought I would try one of the free and open-source alternatives to Bartender before buying latest version of Bartender 7.

The name I had seen many times was Ice. However, it looks like it hasn't been updated for over a year, and I wanted to use something more recently updated, especialy if Golden Gate had compatibility issues.

So now I am trying out Thaw. Thaw 3, the version for macOS 27, is still in alpha. It is kinda buggy, setting it up to hide my menu bar icons took a while - icons kept jumping around and when I dragged an icon into the hidden section, it would only move five seconds after. Eventually it did hide the icons I didn't want to see so it's doing its job for now.