MaxMenus - A powerful menu creation tool

Dec 16, '02 01:44:50AM

Contributed by: robg

MaxMenus iconThe macosxhints Rating:
10 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]

I published a review of MaxMenus back in March, but I had sort of lost track of it after a few system upgrades. This weekend, I had some reasons to dig it out and start using it again, and I'd forgotten just how amazing this little preference panel is. Although older versions had some problems with Jaguar, version 1.2 was recently release with full Jaguar compatibility.

Since there's a full review online, I won't go into a ton of detail, but MaxMenus provides a set of four (actually 20, as each one can display different items for each of four modifier keys) pop-up menus, one at each corner of your screen. Each of these menus is fully customizable regarding the items in the menu, whether or not it has submenus, seaparators, text labels, and much more. When MaxMenus is active, you'll see a small color splotch in each corner of your screen; click on the color to activate a pop-up menu.

Although this behavior by itself is pretty impressive, what really makes MaxMenus stand out is the ability to create your own menus and assign them hot keys that work in any application. For example, I have defined a menu with Control-D that simply lists all my drives in a navigable pop-up. So now to file an item anywhere on my system, I click and hold on the item, hit Control-D, and then drag it into the pop-up menu that appeared right next to it. There is no expansion limit on sub-folders, so you can drill down through your entire system.

I have a second menu defined on Control-E that contains one item - my "QuickLaunch" alias folder from the Finder. This folder contains a number of sub-folders called Browsers, Apps, Utils, Games, Graphics, and Documents. Each of these folders contains aliases to key programs and documents on my system. Now when I need to get something going, I just hit Control-E whereever I happen to be, navigate to the item, and open it. No added mouse movements required, it doesn't matter what window is active, etc. Just what I want to use when I want to use it. I use these menus so often that I've actually turned off the corner menus; I can get everything I need with a hotkey at the current mouse position.

MaxMenus has a ton more features than I've covered here, and it has a free 30 day trial, so there's no excuse not to at least try it out. The interface is just a bit daunting at first, given the complexity of everything you can do, but it's worth the learning curve. In short, it's one of the most useful utilities I've tried in the last six months or so...

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