Any avid mac user is familiar with the capabilities of the Menu bar. There are some great built-in icons in that upper right hand corner of your screen, such as the clock, spotligh search, wireless, and volume control, but here are a few third party options that will take the utility of your menu bar to the next level.

iStat Menus
This is the grand-daddy of menu bar stat tools, offering a pull-down calendar, CPU usage, disk usage, memory usage, network activity, and more. For the short period of time that this was not yet compatible with Snow Leopard, I was completely lost.

Butler
Butler’s goal is to make every day common tasks that you perform on your Mac easier. It’s functionality extends far beyond simply the menu bar, but the menu bar features in particular can make just about every aspect of using your Mac easier and quicker.

Caffeine
Caffeine for your Mac serves the same purpose as it does for your body. It prevents you from falling asleep. This tiny program sits innocently in your menu bar until you activate it before doing any task in which you don’t want your Mac to fall asleep, such as watching a movie.

FeedAnimal
If you have a few RSS/Atom feeds that you like to keep tabs on, then this little menu bar icon is perfect. It displays the unread count next to the icon and can even broadcast new items to Growl.

Spirited Away
Hate clutter on your screen? Spirited Away gets rid of it. It’ll just innocently sit on your menu bar and check to see how long your applications have been idle. If an application is idle for a set amount of time, it will get hidden.

Camouflage
If, like me, you have a desktop cluttered with icons, then you might want to clear that up sometimes and remind yourself of what your wallpaper is. Camouflage temporarily hides all desktop icons to do just that.

Coconut Wifi
Mac OS X has it’s built in wifi icon, but Coconut Wifi offers what it doesn’t. It displays you a small bubble on the menu bar which indicates whether you’re in range of a wireless network or not and gives info if you click it.

Know other free menu bar applications that you think deserve a place on this list? Leave a comment and let us know!