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Short Answer

Unfortunately apple Apple has yet to enable drag and drop functionality of third-party menubar icons, which are known as NSStatusItems. The Without preferences being provided by the developer, the only way to reorder them is by opening the apps in a specific order, latter apps where those opened first will appear to the leftright. In On occasion some cases the vendor has written vendors write code that forces the icon to appear at one end or another and if they haven't provide preferences the other, giving you zero control over its position.

Long Answer

There are two types of icons in the OS X menu bar:

  • MenuExtra: Apple's private class to develop their own menu icons.
  • StatusItem: A class provided for it there's little third-party developers to create menu icons.

    • MenuExtras

    Apple's private class have a number of built-in perks, including:

  • If you double-click them (in the finder) they will load in the menubar and open automatically at login.
  • You can do command-click them (in the menubar) and drag to change reorder them.
  • To remove them you can command-click and drag them off the bar (similar to dock items).

    • Unfortunately Apple doesn't officially sanction the development of 3rd-party MenuExtras. The reason given is that they operate as plugins in the SystemUIServer and faulty code could cause instability in a core part of the operating system.

    StatusItems

    The class for developers doesn't provide such functionality out of the box (as of 10.6 Snow Leopard) and unfortunately there are currently no open source classes that permit commercial use.

    Thus, developers typically do the following, in order of general occurrence:

  • Ignore the issue all together
  • Force a preset position
  • Provide a few basic preferences; or
  • Must write their own classes to duplicate the MenuExtra functionality

    • For a list of available MenuExtras, navigate in the Finder to:

    /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras
    For a well kept list of free and commercial StatusItems, visit:
      
    Super OS X menubar items
    Hope this helps. :) M
    show/hide this revision's text 1

    Unfortunately apple has yet to enable drag and drop functionality of third-party menubar icons, which are known as NSStatusItems. The only way to reorder them is by opening apps in a specific order, latter apps will appear to the left. In some cases the vendor has written code that forces the icon to one end or another and if they haven't provide preferences for it there's little you can do to change the order.