A system update broke every menu bar tool. A designer's side project, Dimble, caught the users who were left

macOS 27 rewrote the menu bar. Bartender, Ice, and Hidden Bar, the tools that organize menu bar icons, all broke on upgrade day. A designer who runs a design team by day started the repo in Aug 20, and in the week the stable release shipped, got a free alternative that only supports macOS 27 to work. It hit 78 stars in 1,115 days. How it took off, what's left of the opening, and which steps to copy if you want a project that gets stars the same way, below, section by section.

One German user switched away from Bartender on a Sep 9 night

On a Sep 2026 9 night in 23:32, user giorgino opened a thread on the German Mac forum MacTechNews titled "Bartender replacement under macOS 27":

"Tonight I switched from Bartender to Pelmet on macOS 27, and I'll keep using it. I've rarely seen support this fast and this friendly. The developer handles every issue right away. It runs perfectly now, unlike Bartender 7 beta and the other alternatives."

Pelmet was Dimble's name at the time. The replies underneath are worth reading too. Someone went through the repo: "The author had almost no GitHub activity for years, then created this repo in Aug 20, and since then the Claude subscription has been running hot... docs, website, probably code too." (sudoRinger, 9-10) giorgino replied: "The code was written by AI, and I hesitated at first. But it's the only tool here that works properly on macOS 27. Every bug I reported was fixed by the next day at the latest."

Some pushed back. On Sep 14, stable release day, another user said he'd tried Ice, Pelmet, and Thaw and "none of them really work." giorgino replied that Pelmet had never broken for him since the RC. That exchange sums up Dimble's first month: every tool broke, and whichever one worked first picked up the users.

What it actually is

A macOS menu bar tool that hides the icons you rarely use. Hover, click, or press a shortcut and they slide back out. Three sections: always visible, hidden, and always hidden. There's also a layout editor; the README says "the editor is a picture, the menu bar is arranged to match it," and one click on Apply sorts everything.

The key is how it hides things. The README says "macOS does the hiding." The macOS 27 menu bar can hide icons natively (the mechanism was originally built for lock-down exam mode), and Dimble drives that directly. So it only supports macOS 27 and later, and users on older systems can't use it.

Free, GPL-3.0, no account, no analytics, just a GitHub Sponsors button. The author, Gabriel Faucon (on GitHub as fif7y), introduced himself on Hacker News as "a design lead by day, back to building Mac apps in my spare time after a long gap, Pelmet is the first." His GitHub account has only this one repo, with 19 followers.

Why now: one system upgrade cleared out the whole category

Jun 8 macOS 27 shipped its first beta, and Sep 14 was the stable release. An Oct 3 technical article (publicspace.net) explains what happened:

"macOS 27 drew the entire menu bar as one window, instead of one small window per icon. So as soon as the first beta came out, Bartender, Ice, Thaw, Hidden Bar, Barbee, SaneBar, and Glow, all the tools that hide icons, stopped working."

Demand came from the outside: millions of people already used these tools, and on upgrade day the tools all broke. A Reddit r/MacOS thread was titled "Every menu bar manager is completely broken on macOS 27. What are you all using?"

Here's what the competitors were doing at the time:

Of the free options, one has stopped updating and one is still in beta, and the paid one is working around the problem. Dimble started in Aug 22 with 0.1, and from the second week of September it shipped several versions a day. During the stable-release week (9-14 to 9-21) it shipped 14 versions, and per-version downloads jumped from double digits to 791, 1,144, 1,267, and 1,577 (GitHub releases, read 11-06). The later 0.3.x stable versions each got 2,900 to 4,300 downloads, and all versions together come to about 25k. That includes auto-updates, so it isn't a user count.

Most of the stars also came in that stretch. By Oct 16 it had 857, and from then to Nov 4 it added only about 120 more, roughly six or seven a day.

Where users come from

There was no advertising and no major English-language media coverage. In order, it went like this:

1. Sep 7, Chinese Mac accounts went first. On X, @jaywcjlove (a.k.a. 小弟调调, maintainer of the large Mac software list awesome-mac) posted: "If your menu bar manager breaks on macOS 27, try Pelmet! Built for macOS 27's new menu bar..." Both the Chinese and English versions of awesome-mac now list Dimble. sudoRinger, the German forum user who went through the repo, said the recommendations on awesome-mac and AlternativeTo were submitted by the author himself (unverified). That's not embarrassing; it's the step this kind of project should take.
2. From Sep 9, word of mouth on forums. That's the German thread that opened this piece. In October, a long MacRumors thread on "which apps work on macOS 27" also had someone writing "Dimble works well on macOS 27 too."
3. Around Sep 17, SEO articles and Mac software directories. lumakes published "Pelmet: the best free menu bar tool for macOS 27" in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and English. There were also hysenlabs, 52gww, and CSDN reposts. macmenubar.com, MacGrove (tagged "Top pick"), AlternativeTo, and other directories listed it. This layer caught searches like "macOS 27 menu bar broken."
4. The author's own posts didn't do much. A Show HN the same day got 2 points and 0 comments. Engagement on self-posts to Reddit wasn't captured.
5. Nov 4, second wave. @dingyi (Ding, about 160k followers), a Chinese indie developer, posted a video: "Tried this and it really works. dimble.fif7y.com" The repo added 107 stars that day and 30 more the day after (GitHub, 11-06). The timing lines up, but the causation is an inference.

So its heat stayed within Chinese Mac circles, German forums, and directory sites. 9to5 Mac, the MacRumors homepage, and The Verge never covered it, and almost nobody on English X mentioned it.

Why it made the list

• It works where others don't. Other tools worked around the problem on 27 (switching layouts, screenshot-based icon recognition). Dimble uses the system's own mechanism and handles the edge cases. Siri and Time Machine can only be hidden as a pair in the system, so it splits them into two separate items you can place individually.
• Fast fixes, and they're visible. It has a built-in beta channel and rolls up a stable release every week or two. Each update note says which issue from which reporter got fixed. That's where the German user's "fixed by the next day at the latest" came from.
• It looks good. The official site, GIFs, and interactions were designed by a designer and hold up next to big accounts' posts, so promoting it doesn't embarrass anyone. That's why it got recommended and kept, not why it got traffic.

One lesson: the name changed twice

It launched in August as Pelmet, but another developer (ismatBabirli) almost simultaneously released a menu bar app also called Pelmet, under MIT with about ten stars. So it was renamed Pliss. Then someone noted in issue #91 that Pliss differed from another project by a single letter, and it became Dimble, finalized on Oct 17 0.3.2. The cost: the September articles, directory listings, and the AlternativeTo entry still say Pelmet, so search traffic is split three ways. Check for name collisions before you pick a name.

Who's following

a batch of "hide macOS 27 menu bar icons" side projects popped up after one system event: MenuBarHider (9-18 repo, 177 stars), frost (10-01, pitched on Liquid Glass, 36 stars), IceMelt (a patched Ice, under 20 stars); the commercial Tuck (Pro $14.99) built a macOS 27 compatibility table to pull search traffic, and in Nov 4 added Dimble to it too. These look like parallel reactions to the same event, not obvious copies of Dimble. The real chaser is Thaw 3.0: more features, supports older systems, and once its stable release ships, Dimble's "only one that works" claim stops holding.

There is also an external risk: Dimble is built entirely on the hidden mechanism in macOS 27, and if Apple changes it in 27.x, the moat moves with it.

If it were you

Verdict: C. The approach is very worth learning from, but this patch of ground isn't worth chasing again. The "macOS 27 menu bar manager" gap was filled by September: Bartender 7 has shipped and Thaw 3.0 is on the way, and the later MenuBarHider and frost will get a hundred or two stars at most. The window was the couple of weeks around the stable release, and it has passed.

Who it fits: indie devs who write Swift / SwiftUI and know macOS well, who want an open-source Mac tool that can reach thousands of stars, and who are willing to bet their next window on a major system release.

Who it doesn't fit: anyone who wants to build another macOS 27 menu bar tool now (you'd be number seven or eight); anyone hoping to earn money from it (this category barely sustains one person even on GitHub Sponsors); anyone unwilling to ship several releases a day and answer issues one by one.

How to do it (if you want a project that gets the same stars): copy the structure, not the topic. Each June when WWDC ships beta versions, look for which common tools the new system breaks (menu bars, window managers, input methods, screenshot and clipboard tools, anything running on private APIs, which break first); during the beta, rewrite one using the new system's own mechanism, support only the new system, and put "native implementation" in the first paragraph of the README; the release that goes out in the stable week has to work, not be a first draft.

How to get users: before the stable release, submit the repo to awesome-mac, AlternativeTo and the "alternatives" directories; go straight to Chinese Mac-circle recommenders (this time @jaywcjlove and @dingyi both tweets worked) and local Mac forums in German, Japanese and similar languages, which convert better than Show HN; name the people who reported bugs in each release notes so users want to speak up for you.

When to start: the next window is the first beta of macOS 28 in June 2027. By then you should have a ready project that you can change quickly, and know two or three people who will share it.

What would show this read was wrong: ① a new macOS 27 menu bar tool gets thousands of stars within a month or two after November, meaning the gap wasn't full and C underestimated it; ② Thaw 3.0's stable release keeps slipping and Bartender 7's reputation collapses while Dimble keeps gaining dozens to hundreds of stars a week, meaning the "only one that works" window lasts longer than I think; ③ the other way round: Dimble's growth comes entirely from those two tweets, and anyone who runs this same play on the next major system release gets only a few hundred stars, meaning this was mostly luck, not method.

Data and sources

GitHub repo fif7y/dimble: stars, forks, release notes and download counts, README (as of 11-06); daily star changes (from 10-16). MacTechNews forum thread "Bartender Alternative unter macOS27" (from 9-09). publicspace.net (10-03), usetuck.com compatibility table (11-02). X: @jaywcjlove (9-07), @dingyi (11-04). Show HN (9-17, HN Algolia). Star counts for Ice, Thaw, Hidden Bar, MenuBarHider and frost from GitHub (11-06). Anything marked "inferred" is an inference.