Product MaxMenus - Proteron
Version/URL 1.0 / http://www.proteron.com/maxmenus/
Type / Price Shareware, $29.95

Review Date March 3, 2002
Description A poweful, flexible customized menu utiltity
Tested on G4/733 running OS X 10.1.3


Summary

MaxMenus is a tool designed to help you create customized menus that mesh with your needs and work habits. MaxMenus installs four menu widgets, one in each corner of your screen, each color-coded with a semi-transparent color. Each menu is actually four menus in one, as modifier keys can completely change the behavior of a given menu position. MaxMenus also adds some enhancements to the dock, and features a powerful and flexible user interface.

Installation and Setup

It's a little bit difficult to categorize MaxMenus. At its simplest level, MaxMenus places four 'pop-up' menus at each corner of your screen. But if this is the only way in which you use the program, you are missing out on many of its better features. One of the first things that the documentation asks the user to do is to spend a few minutes with the "two-minute tour", a two-page mini-manual. Five quick points provides the basics of using MaxMenus, and touch on a couple of the more key features of the program. The remaining nine pages of the well written manual provide greater detail on all of MaxMenus' features.

Picture of main screenMaxMenus installs as a Preference Pane and all settings are configured through the main panel shown at left. As you can see, MaxMenus ships with an extensive set of pre-defined menu settings. Each menu can be activated with keyboard modifiers, which can result in completely different behavior for each menu.

MaxMenus installed easily on my machine, and requested that I logout and login to activate it. Once this was done, the preference panel was installed and I was ready to start maximizing my menus.

The image also shows that each menu can not only be customized, but also that it is possible to edit the settings for each menu (more on that later), add a new menu, or delete an existing menu. I found the interface to be clean and easy to understand and use. The one 'gotcha' that you might run into is that MaxMenus itself is not available while its pref pane is open on the screen. Remember to close the system preferences window (or switch to another pane) after you've finished editing your MaxMenus settings, otherwise MaxMenus won't be running (even when you switch to another application).

Customizing an existing menu is done by selecting one from the pop-up list and then dragging items back and forth between the left and right hand columns. Items in the left-hand window are active; those in the right are not.

Picture of main screenThere are also three tabs to pick from; Menus is where you'll begin customizing the settings, Hot Keys allows you to assign a hot key to open any item on your hard drive, and the Options tab includes the ability to disable MaxMenus, and a flag called "Improve the Dock's Finder menu." When you enable this option (which I would recommend you should), you gain a much more useful "dock Finder icon" contextual menu, as seen in the image to the right.

At the top of the enhanced pop-up are some recent items, then quick access to the Open dialog, Sherlock, and your favorites. Finally, and most interesting, an option has been added which controls Classic, along with direct access to all your system preference panes, including custom panes! MaxMenus is the program which will finally remove "Prefling" (a dockling which did the same thing) from my system. Although this enhanced Finder menu seems almost like a "throwaway" feature, it's actually one of my favorite things about MaxMenus.

Customizing and Managing Menus

Another thing I like about the program is the fact that the menus themselves are extremely customizable. You can control what's listed in a menu, put the items in the order you wish, add seperators and dividing text, and control where on the screen it will pop up from and with which keystrokes. But there are two truly outstanding features about the menu system as implemented in MaxMenus. First, there is no five-level limit on subfolder navigation! You initially are stopped at five levels of depth, but if you simply hover for a second on the last item, the previous levels vanish and you can continue navigating downwards. Second, the menus are all spring-loaded. You can drag and drop into every menu (unless you elect not to make a menu spring loaded). Coupled with the removal of the five-level limit on subdirectories, this means you can now put anything into any level of your file system from one menu!

Picture of main screenThe other nice thing about the customization is that you can fully customize all menus, including the standard corner menus. Menu customization is done through the interface shown at left. You control which corner it appears in, which modifier keys will be used with it, whether or not you'd like it spring loaded, and what (if any) hotkey to use with the menu.

You can even change the color of the little color splotch that appears

This degree of customization of the stock features is what really set MaxMenus apart for me. Although I found the menus in the corners to be interesting, they were much too far away for easy use. But through the customization interface, I changed their behavior. They are no longer in the corner, but they all have a hotkey of their own. So now, whereever I want a menu, I hit the hotkey and I have the menu right there. The usefulness of this feature is hard to describe until you've tried it!

Controlling Menu Items' Behavior

Picture of main screenOnce you have the menu set up the way you like it, the next step is to set the behavior of the items within the menu. Clicking on the aqua-colored dot next to any menu item (visible in the first screenshot) brings up the item customization menu shown at right.

You can create a customized name, disable the display of icons (useful on slower machines), and control the size of the submenu pop-ups. The "Folder Contents" box contains some powerful options as well. If you check "Hide Documents", you can easily create an application launching menu with no documents cluttering the view. Checking "Folders appear at the bottom" accomplishes just that - all folders will be displayed after individual items.

The "List contents in this menu" item is the most powerful feature in the customization screen. When enabled, the contents of a folder in the menu are listed within the current menu. If this feature is enabled, you can optionally display the name of the folder above the items within that folder. When left unchecked, the folder's contents appear as a submenu "pop-up" from the current menu.

Using these customization features, it's possible to build menus which contain exactly what you wish them to contain, and that behave exactly as you wish them to behave.

Creating New Menus

After tweaking the customized menus, the next thing I did was to create my own menu. This is just as easy as editing an existing menu, except you choose "New Menu..." from the pop-up on the main screen. You then drag in the items and dividers you would like to use, set your preferences for locations and/or hot keys, and you're done. So now I have a customized menu with my favorite folders in it for easy drag and drop file saving from the bottom corner of the screen, or for quick access with control-option-space from anywhere I'd like!

Areas of Concern

I've been using MaxMenus extensively for the last four or five days, and have had only one minor problem with it. When attempting to access a volume that had more than five sublevels, I wasn't able to go any deeper. Closing and reopening the menu did the trick. Other than that, the program has been rock solid for me. I have read a couple of reports on mailing lists of issues with Timbuktu, but I have read just as many counter postings claiming no problems at all. I do not have Timbuktu installed, though, so I can't add any evidence one way or the other. Your mileage may vary, but I have had no issues with stability or interference as a result of MaxMenus residing in my system.

Outside of that one incident, I've had no problems with MaxMenus at all. In fact, it's a great example of one of the ways in which OS X is an improvement over OS 9. Similar programs in OS 9 would require all sorts of trickery with the system, and would have to live as an extension, potentially causing1 problems with other extensions and the system in general. With OS X, MaxMenus installs one file in one location which is easily removed, and does no low-level system hackery, thereby minimizing issues with other applications.

Conclusion

I was a Proteron customer for many years, as I was simply addicted to Action GoMac in OS 9. With the Dock in OS X, it was obvious that Proteron would not ship an OS X version of Action GoMac. With the release of MaxMenus, however, they have fulfilled my needs perfectly. This nifty little utility has already taken up permanent residence in my suite of required OS X utilities.