The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 9 out of 10]
- Developer: Abracode / Product Page
- Price: Free
Do you get the most out of the Finder's easily customized contextual menu (the one that appears when you control-click on a file or folder)? This menu is one of the best places to store often-used commands for files and folders, and there are tons of third-party contextual menu items out there that do just that. My personal favorite is the QuickAcessCM, which gives you four new contextual menu options, highlighted in red at left. When you control-click on a file or folder, you can select the Quick Access item (more on that later), or any of move, copy or alias operations. All menus are easily customizable, either from the menus themselves, or via a separate preferences application that you can run.
Each menu option is relatively self-explanatory; you can store often-used folders in the Move, Copy, and Make Alias menu items for easy control-click filing. For instance, in this screenshot, I'm using the Move To option to move a recent download from my desktop into the Downloads folder. The Quick Access menu is a launcher, of sorts -- unlike the other options, you can store folders and files in the Quick Access option. Select a file from the pop-up, and the program launches; select a document, and it opens in its creating application; select a folder, and the folder opens in the Finder. While it won't replace Butler for me, it does the job and keeps very often used objects a mouse click away.
The only reason I marked QuickAccessCM down from a 10 is that the "move" item only works correctly for folders on the same drive. If you move an item from one drive to another, it actually copies. But this is a minor inconvenience at worst...
QuickAccessCM is free, easy to install, and easy to use. I've been using it for quite a while, and just have always overlooked it, as it feels like it's part of the OS. There are some additional (free and non-free) contextual menu plug-ins on the Contextual Menu Workshop site; check them out if you'd like your contextual menu to become even more powerful (The Grim Ripper is another favorite of mine, for quickly killing resource forks). And yea, it's Thursday and I'm just getting this online ... sorry!

