Working with it

The menu bar lamp

One lamp beside the clock, and a panel that can live under it instead of in a window of its own.

The panel can live in one of two places, and a lamp can sit in the menu bar in either case. The two are separate switches, and the reason is worth a sentence: the panel floats below the system menus, so a full-screen editor covers it. Somebody who keeps the panel out all day may still want the lamp for exactly those moments.

The two homes

Its own window. Above everything, staying where you put it, until you put it away. This is what the panel has always been and what it still is by default.

Under the lamp. It opens when you click the lamp and closes when you click it again, the way a menu does.

The button under the rows, beside the one that narrows the panel, moves it either way, and so does Panel lives in, in Settings › Panel. Nothing else changes: the same column, the same click on a row, the same card, the same menus.

Coming back, the panel returns to the corner you last left it in, not to wherever the drop-down happened to be hanging. If it has never had a corner of its own, because it went to the menu bar first, it hangs from the top right where a new panel goes.

A drop-down closes when you click elsewhere. That is what makes it a drop-down rather than a window hanging off an icon, and it is the whole of the difference between the two homes. It is also the cost: getting to a row becomes two gestures instead of none.

What the lamp says

One lamp, carrying the most urgent state the column is showing.

A number appears beside it when more than one row is in that state and that state wants something from you. Three blocked sessions read as three; six resting ones read as a lamp, because a count of things asking for nothing is noise in the place where space is scarcest.

Six lamps up there would be a second column, worse than the first at everything the first is for.

Count beside the lamp, in Settings › Panel, puts two numbers beside the lamp instead: how many sessions want you — needing you, done and unread, stopped — and how many are at work, zeros included, since "nothing waits, three at work" is half of the answer. Off by default, so nobody's menu bar changes width on an update they did not ask for.

For amber, green and red: the three states a click clears, which are the three that mean there is news nobody has taken in.

Yellow and blue never blink. A session merely working is the ordinary condition of the machine, and a signal that is on for most of the day is not a signal.

Don't blink on a project silences the movement up here as well, and not the colour, which is what it means on a row too.

At rest it is a ring

A hollow ring that follows the menu bar's own light, like the grey ring of a resting row in the column. It is the shape the lamp spends most of the day in, so it has to read as an empty place, never as a fault.

Right-clicking the lamp

A short menu:

Put the panel in its own window is the way back if the drop-down ever cannot be opened. Everything else is in the panel, one click away.

Hiding the lamp is a switch in Settings › Panel, Show a lamp in the menu bar. It stays on while the panel lives in the menu bar, because nothing else could bring the panel back.

If the lamp is not there

A menu bar can be full. macOS does not say so — it accepts the lamp, and then draws nothing.

The panel handles it rather than leaving you with a home you cannot open. When it is set to live in the menu bar and the lamp was not drawn, it comes back to its own window and tells you why. The lamp stays switched on, so it returns of its own accord once the bar has room: closing a few menu bar items, or moving some into a manager, is enough.

Starting LampBoard again always shows the panel, wherever it lives. It has no Dock icon, so opening it from Spotlight or the Finder while it is already running used to do nothing at all. It is now the way to fetch the panel when you cannot see it.

What it summarises

The column, not the sessions behind it. Grouping, the only what's waiting filter and the hidden set all change which rows you can see, and the lamp answers for what is on screen.

Hidden projects still count. A hidden project is not a forgotten one: see one row per project.