Over at Cult of Mac, author Craig Grannell has posted a roundup of six great utilities that you may or may not have heard of that will transform the way you interact with the menu bar in Mac OS X.
Among some of my favorites are iStat, which I’ve been using a dashboard widget of for years (although I’m seriously thinking of making the switch to the menu extra), iTunes Menu (which allows you to control iTunes from the menubar instead of having to find it under your apps or again, use a deashboard widget), and Isolator (which keeps you from getting distracted by fading apps other than the active one).
It’s a pretty good list, and I think I’ve found a few good ones to download myself.