How to access common Mac utilities from your menu bar

Open your browser. Look at the tabs. If you are like most Mac users who do any technical work, somewhere in there is jsonformatter.org or one of its many clones, base64decode.org, regex101.com, a slug generator, a UUID v4 generator, an HTTP status code reference, a chmod calculator, a Lorem Ipsum site, and possibly a unit converter. Each of them gets visited a few times a week. None of them are particularly trustworthy with sensitive data. All of them load slowly because they wedge full-page ads around a 30-line JavaScript function.

The point of this article is that you can stop. Mac has a small category of multi-tool utility apps that bundle a few dozen of these one-shot tools behind a single menu bar icon. Click the icon, pick the tool, paste the input, get the output, all without opening a browser, hitting a website, or worrying about who sees your data.

What I ship in this category is teenytool. There are alternatives, and the right answer depends on what you specifically reach for. The case for the multi-tool category in general is the part to focus on first.

Why this is worth doing

Five reasons most Mac users underweight, in roughly the order they will hit you.

Privacy. Every utility website you paste into is a place where your data ends up. Most of them claim to do everything client-side, and most of them probably do, but you cannot verify it without reading the JS. JWT decoders, password strength checkers, HTML entity encoders, JSON formatters: all of these regularly handle data you would not want logged to a third party. A local app on your Mac removes the question. For the most common developer case, see the offline JSON formatter for Mac guide.

Speed. Loading jsonformatter.org from cold is two or three seconds. Loading the JSON formatter inside a menu bar app is instant. Across a workweek of small lookups, the time difference adds up to roughly a half hour you got back.

Reliability. The site you bookmarked goes through a redesign or pivots to a paid tier or simply dies. The tool you have on your Mac keeps working. Some of the regex tester sites that were free in 2018 are now $9 a month with a worse UI than they had originally. The local-app version of any utility outlasts whatever the web version is doing this quarter.

Bundle math. If you have ten different utility sites you visit regularly, each is essentially free, but the cognitive overhead of remembering which site does what, switching between them, and tolerating their ads is real. One menu bar icon with the same set of tools is worth more than ten browser tabs.

No tab pollution. Every tab is one more thing pulling at your attention. Closing the utility-site tabs is a small win in browser hygiene.

What a multi-tool app actually contains

The category varies, but the shape is consistent. A menu bar icon opens a popup with a search field and a tool list. Each tool has its own small panel with its inputs and outputs. The most common categories that show up across these apps:

• Text and string. Case conversion, find and replace, regex testing, slugify, sort lines, remove duplicate lines, line counting, trim whitespace, URL encode and decode, base64 encode and decode, HTML entity encoding, JSON formatting, JSON diff, YAML to JSON conversion, CSV to JSON, SQL formatting, JS minification, lorem ipsum generation, markdown preview, word counting, ASCII to Unicode.
• Numbers and math. Basic calculator, percentage of, percent change, percent difference, days between, age calculator, unit converter, number base conversion (hex, binary, octal, decimal), Roman numerals, aspect ratio.
• Colors. Color converter, complementary colors, color opposites, contrast checker (WCAG), gradient generator, palette generator, tint and shade, color picker.
• Images. Crop, flip, rotate, resize, compress, strip EXIF, watermark.
• Files and PDF. Merge PDFs, split PDFs, rotate PDFs, extract text from PDFs.
• Developer. Hash generator (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512), UUID generator, JWT decoder, password generator, password strength checker, QR code generator, chmod calculator, cron explainer, IP address lookup, DNS lookup, HTTP status code reference, format converter, CSS tools.
• Clock. Pomodoro timer, stopwatch, generic timer, time zone converter, world clock, Unix timestamp converter.
• Random. Coin flip, dice roller, random number, random color, emoji search.

Different multi-tool apps include different subsets. The point is the shape: a single menu bar icon, a search box, a list of small tools, each with a tight purpose.

Option 1: TeenyTool ($14.99 once)

What I ship. Native Swift, $14.99 lifetime, 3-day free trial. 75+ individual tools across the eight categories above. Most tools run locally on your Mac. The named network exceptions are license validation, update checks, IP Address, and DNS Lookup. No telemetry, no cloud sync.

What is in there beyond the tool list itself:

• Search across all tools. Type "json" to filter to anything JSON-related, "color" for the color tools, "pdf" for PDF tools.
• Favorite tools. Star up to 12 tools you use every day, then drag to reorder them in the menu bar favorites list.
• Per-tool settings persistence. The case-converter remembers your preferred output style. The Lorem Ipsum generator remembers your preferred length. The Pomodoro timer remembers your work and break intervals.
• Global keyboard shortcut to open the popup, plus per-tool shortcuts for the tools you reach for most often.
• Native Swift implementations of every tool. The JSON formatter is JSONSerialization, the hash tool is CryptoKit, the JWT decoder parses the three-segment structure directly, the regex tester uses NSRegularExpression. No JavaScript bridge, no web view fallbacks, no third-party libraries doing the work.
• Quick output copy. Every tool has a one-click copy of the result.

Things teenytool does not do: cloud sync, scripting hooks beyond the system Shortcuts integration, automated workflows that chain tools together. Each tool is a focused single-purpose panel, and that is the whole product opinion.

Option 2: DevUtils ($29 once or $19/yr)

DevUtils by Tony Dinh is the developer-focused multi-tool. About 50 tools, mostly aimed at programmers (JSON, JWT, regex, base64, hashes, time conversions). Native Mac, well-maintained. The pricing is $29 once or a $19/yr subscription that includes a year of updates and priority support.

Pick if: you are specifically a developer, you do not need image and PDF tools, and the polished developer-tool feel matters more than breadth.

Option 3: PowerTools / Toolbox apps on the App Store

The Mac App Store has a long tail of multi-tool apps under names like "Power Tools," "Pocket Tools," "Mac Toolbox," and similar. Many are reskins of similar JavaScript libraries packaged as native apps. Quality varies sharply. Some are excellent and cheap. Some are abandoned.

The risk in this category is that the developer disappears and the app stops getting macOS-version updates. Worth checking the last update date before buying.

Option 4: Individual focused apps

You can also ignore the multi-tool category entirely and install one focused app per need. Examples:

• JSON formatter and viewer: JSON Viewer Pro or the JSON viewer built into your editor.
• Regex testing: Patterns, $2.99 once, focused.
• Pomodoro: Be Focused, free.
• Hash generation: macOS Terminal with shasum.
• Unit conversion: Soulver, $34 once (which also handles a lot of math).

This stack works. The cost is higher in app management even when individual prices are low. Each app is its own update, support, and menu bar slot. The point of multi-tool apps is to consolidate.

Setting up TeenyTool

1. Download from teenytool.com, drag to Applications, launch.
2. The menu bar icon appears. Click it. The popup opens with a search field and category list.
3. Type to filter or browse the categories. Click a tool to open it as a panel inside the popup.
4. Optional: star the tools you use most often. They will pin to the top of the popup.
5. Optional: bind a global hotkey for "open teenytool" in Preferences. Default is ⌘⇧T.

The tools that surprise people

Of the 75+ tools in teenytool, the ones first-week users tend to reach for that they did not expect to need:

Cron explainer. Paste a cron expression like 0 9 * * 1-5 and get a plain-English description ("Every weekday at 9:00 AM"). Saves a Google trip every time you set up a scheduled task.

JWT decoder. Paste a token, see the decoded header and payload, verify the signature against a key. Done locally; never paste a JWT into jwt.io and assume nothing logged it.

Strip EXIF. Drag an image in, get a clean copy with no GPS coordinates or camera metadata. Useful before posting screenshots or photos publicly.

Number base converter. Toggle between hex, decimal, binary, octal at the same time. Better than typing printf '%x' 255 in the terminal.

Days between. Pick two dates, get the count. Used by lawyers, project managers, and anyone counting business days till a deadline.

Contrast checker. WCAG ratio for two colors, AA and AAA pass/fail at normal and large text. The focused guide is Mac color contrast checker.

Pomodoro timer. 25/5 default, configurable. The notification fires through native macOS Notification Center, so it shows up where your other notifications do.

When the multi-tool is not the right answer

Skip the multi-tool path if:

• You only need one of the included tools. A focused single-purpose app is cleaner.
• You need the deepest version of a specific tool (forensic regex testing, professional color management, advanced PDF editing). Specialty apps go deeper than any multi-tool will.
• You are minimalist about menu bar real estate and the marginal utility of these tools is low for your workflow.

Pick the multi-tool path if:

• You find yourself reaching for several of the included tools each week.
• You want to retire some of the random utility tabs you keep open.
• You care about not pasting potentially sensitive data into third-party websites.

Common questions

Can I pin individual tools?

Yes. teenytool lets you favorite up to 12 tools, reorder them, and assign per-tool shortcuts from settings.

Will it slow down my Mac?

No. The app is small and lazy: tool views are only created when you open them, the menu bar idle uses around 25MB of RAM, and individual tool computations are fast enough to be unnoticeable.

Does it work offline?

Most tools work fully offline. The named network exceptions are license validation, update checks, IP Address, and DNS Lookup. The whole point of the app is local-first, but network-specific tools are honest about needing the network.

Are the tools accurate?

The text/JSON/encoding tools use Apple's standard libraries, which are exactly as accurate as they are anywhere. The math tools use Swift's native numerics, which are accurate within the precision limits of floating-point arithmetic. The image tools use Core Graphics. Where a tool's correctness matters (hash generation, JWT decoding, contrast calculation), the implementation matches the relevant RFC or standard.

Does it work on Apple Silicon and Intel?

Yes. Universal binary.

Does it sync across multiple Macs?

No. Settings and favorites are local. The trade-off is no account requirement.

The bottom line

If you find yourself bookmarking utility websites, opening developer-tool tabs, or context-switching to your browser to convert one number from hex to decimal, a multi-tool menu bar app saves you a few minutes a day and a lot of cognitive overhead. teenytool at $14.99 lifetime is the focused paid pick with 75+ tools across eight categories. DevUtils at $29 is the developer-specific deeper option. Specialty apps are the right answer when you need depth, not breadth.