Would you rather have such a small background app possess a huge dock icon?

cottinghamk, I don't know how best to address this issue, but to me it clearly is a problem.

In the past year or so, developers have created more applications with menubar items than were offered in all 4 previous years combined. Once it was clear that people like the quick and easy access to info and commands that menubar items can provide, developers immediately began to abuse them. Out of the last 15 applications I installed on my MacBook or iMac, all 15 had menubar items of some sort; 4 of them OFFERED NO PREFERENCE TO TURN OFF OR HIDE THEM, leading me to immediately trash them all as a matter of principle — whether I liked them or not; and ONLY ONE of those 15 apps had a legitimate need for a menubar icon and used it appropriately!

Menubar items have even given rise to new classes of apps that exist only BECAUSE they can be so easily accessed/controlled, or even simply because of the NOVELTY of that new access/control mechanism. A year ago, I had only ONE menubar item on my 20-inch iMac — a really great weather forecast app called Meteorologist. Today my computers have so many menubar icons that several of them are crowded out whenever any app other than the Finder is up front and active! And yet, out of all 14 menubar items that today live atop my iMac's screen, in the past 6 days I have used only one — Meteorologist!

Menubar items are a great way to access your software's information or commands, but most developers use them in apps that don't need them or in inefficient/inappropriate ways — the consequences of which are rarely borne by the developers, but instead most directly affect the end users (a sort of high tech 'externality'), so it is we who must tell the developers to stop using them so liberally and quit messing up our systems.

Hi, I developed this App. I sure as hell didn't want it to have a dock icon, but since the App has status (user must know when it's updating, must be able to check the latest downloads at a glance, must know if errors occurred) I couldn't have it as a Preference Pane or as an invisible background process, so the only option left was to do a menubar App. Actually, I think Catch is exactly the kind of App that *should* be on the menubar, unlike others. I used DropBox as a reference UI model, and it shows.
That said, if you know of a better way to do this (assuming you know what this App does) I'd love to hear it!