System Preferences

This example will demonstrate how to enable the display menulet.

1. Open System preferences then click on a Displays
2. Click on the check box next to phrase "Show displays in menu bar" (note that when a check is visible in the box the menulet is enabled, otherwise the menulet is disabled)
   
   
   

Now look at the menulets in the upper right corner of the screen and observe that the display menulet is now visible.  You will now be able to access and configure several display preferences directly from the menulet.  You can also customize the number of items to display within the display menulet.

 

Just perform similar steps to enable menulets for other system preferences. 

 

From the Hard Drive
As we have seen, there is a procedure to enable menulets via System Preferences.  Did you know that there are several menulets that can be enabled that don't show up in System Preferences?  One very useful one is the Eject menulet that allows you to open and close the your CD/DVD drive without having use the eject button on the keyboard.

In Mac OS X Tiger, the system menulets are located in the following location:
Macintosh HD/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras

You can enable a the eject menulet two ways.  You can either double click Eject.menu or highlight Eject.menu then perform the following steps using the Finder menu:

1. Click File
2. Click Open With
   
3. Then Click SystemUIServer(default)

Then look at the upper right corner of your screen and you will see the Eject menulet displayed.  You'll quickly discover that the Eject menulet wording changes to reflect the current state of the drive.  On a system with a SuperDrive it will state either "Open SuperDrive" or "Close Superdrive" when clicked.

When you navigate to the Menu Extras folder on your Macintosh Hard Drive, you will see the following menulets in Tiger:

• AirPort.menu
• Battery.menu
• Bluetooth.menu
• Classic.menu
• Clock.menu
• Displays.menu
• Eject.menu
• Fax.menu
• HomeSync.menu
• iChat.menu
• Ink.menu
• IrDA.menu
• PCCard.menu
• PPP.menu
• PPPoE.menu
• RemoteDesktop.menu
• Script Menu.menu
• Sync.menu
• TextInput.menu
• User.menu
• Verizon.menu
• Volume.menu
• VPN.menu