The first one was present in Mac OS 9 Finder, and was a window view option with which you could have Finder windows reduced to tabs in the bottom. Very useful if you wanted to keep a series of windows permanently on screen without being too invasive. The command was View > as Pop-up window. I miss this often.

The second one could be a nice improvement over the typical menubar clutter. I’d love to have certain menu extras to appear only when there’s notable activity from the related service/application. For instance, the Time Machine icon could appear only during backups. If this doesn’t convince you, another interesting alternative would be to have the option to choose between the icon in the menubar or in the Dock. That would bring Docklings (of Mac OS X 10.0 memory) back. Why move the menubar clutter to the Dock, you’ll ask: well, the Dock is more flexible, literally, while you can only have a certain amount of menubar estate (those using 13.3″ MacBooks know that well). In System Preferences you could even have all 3 options, like this:

Just saying.