My menu bar has opinions now

I put a little feed in my Mac’s menu bar and found out I’m a much better critic than fan.

It started as a personalization thing. The menu bar is the one strip of screen I look at a few hundred times a day, and it tells me almost nothing… the time, the battery, a Wi-Fi icon. I wanted one line up there that changed through the day. A quote, a weird fact, a headline. Something hands off that made the computer feel a little more like mine.

So: Ticker. A small Mac app that sits next to the clock and rotates through quotes, facts, news, AI news, research, essays and “on this day” events. Every 15 seconds it shows something new. Click it and you get the full text and a link to the source.

The first version came with a list of motivational quotes, which is how I learned I hate motivational quotes. I ran myself through a little taste quiz… pick the ones you like, skip the rest. I went eight for eight on operators and fighters (Andy Grove’s “only the paranoid survive,” Mike Tyson’s “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”) and rejected basically everything you’d find on a poster. Steve Jobs telling me real artists ship, no. Wayne Gretzky and his 100% of shots, no. Mary Oliver asking about my one wild and precious life, respectfully, no. My taste turned out to be roughly “Seneca, but make it a cage fight.”

Kept: “Only the paranoid survive.” (Andy Grove) · “Competition is for losers.” (Peter Thiel) · “Make something people want.” (Paul Graham) · “Discipline equals freedom.” (Jocko Willink) · “While we are postponing, life speeds by.” (Seneca)

Cut: “Real artists ship.” (Steve Jobs) · “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” (Wayne Gretzky) · “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” (Steve Martin) · “Good prose is like a windowpane.” (George Orwell) · “The unexamined life is not worth living.” (Socrates)

Facts went the same way. I liked anything that bends time (Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid) and anything about where words come from. Animal trivia was out, with one exception for wombats, whose poop is cube-shaped, which I stand by.

A list of 78 quotes runs dry fast when it changes every 15 seconds, so Ticker now pulls new ones from Wikiquote, which lists real quotes with real sources. The first batch was a good reminder that the internet is not edited. Theodore Roosevelt showed up with a racist line about Native Americans and a pile of half sentences like “We of the United States need above all things to remember that.” Andy Warhol showed up three times with the same quote in three different wordings, all wrapped in parentheses for some reason. So now there are rules. No fragments, no near-duplicates, nothing crude, nothing over 150 characters, and if a person keeps disappointing me they come off the list entirely. Roosevelt was the first to go. The pool is past a thousand quotes from 40 people and still growing.

News has its own rule: if I can’t read it for free, it doesn’t get a slot. That knocked out the New York Times and, to be safe, the BBC. Substack newsletters only show posts marked free. Twenty-one sources made it in, from NPR to Paul Graham’s essays to a handful of AI newsletters.

Wikipedia’s “on this day” was too wordy for a menu bar, so it gets cut down to one clause and filtered to art, tech, space, business and firsts. No wars, no disasters. I tried adding “born on this day” for people in fields I like and it was almost entirely basketball players I’d never heard of. That idea lasted about ten minutes.

Then I put a thumbs up and a thumbs down at the end of every line. Thumbs down skips it and it never comes back. Whatever I like shows up more often. Any quote author who racks up two more downs than ups gets dropped.

Three weeks in, I’ve given 4 thumbs up and 24 thumbs down. Liked: Weegee’s “f/8 and be there,” a fact about a paint pigment made from ground-up mummies, an NPR story about gene-edited embryos, and Lichtenstein’s Whaam! debuting in 1963. Disliked, among others: the fact about what a “slug” is in a newsroom. Given where I work, I’m choosing not to read into that.

The building part had its own small comedy. My Mac’s developer tools had a leftover file from 2023 that broke every build before it started. Then the scrolling text kept turning invisible, because the menu bar’s frosted glass effect was quietly blending it into nothing. The fix was to draw the text the old-fashioned way, one frame at a time. Very glamorous.

What I keep noticing is that almost none of the work was adding things. It was deciding what not to show me. Every feature after day one was a filter: no paywalls, no fragments, no duplicates, no wars, no basketball players. Which is basically the job in editing too. The good version is mostly what you had the nerve to cut.

I don’t actually look at it that often. But some afternoons I just watch it, the way you’d watch a fish tank, if the fish occasionally quoted Seneca at you.

Code’s here if you want your own: github.com/luketavarodriguez/ticker