Excellent Menu Bar App XMenu Updated

xmenu-20090708.jpg

XMenu from the Devonthink people is one of those freeware apps that I recommend to every Mac user I meet. The latest update, version 1.9, is newly released and boasts visual refinements and a helpful new feature.

For the uninitiated, XMenu is a Menu Bar widget for getting to stuff quickly without leaving the app you’re in. What I like most about it is its flexibility. You can have six different shortcuts in your Menu Bar if you like, or just one if you prefer to keep things simple.

That’s what I do. I use the user-defined widget and throw aliases for useful files and folders into ~/Library/Application Support/XMenu – that way, I keep my Menu Bar uncluttered but XMenu still gives me quick click access to stuff like my todo.txt, my income and expenses records, and a handful of use-them-every-day folders.

If your Dock is overcrowded with folders or stacks that you don’t use because, well, because it’s overcrowded, then you should have a look at XMenu. This latest update adds a text snippets manager that works just the same as the user-defined widgets. Put some plain or rich text files in the right place, and XMenu will let you insert them into any app with two clicks.

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About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. He has a website you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

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Posted in News, Reviews, Software |

  • http://www.markdotzler.com Mark

    WARNING: Don’t double click the XMenu icon from the volume. I made a terrible mistake and did that. Now I can’t get the volume off my desktop (won’t eject because it’s running) and have found no way of controlling the program.

  • http://www.markdotzler.com Mark

    Got control of it through Command-clicking the icon. The people at DEVON were great in helping me and very fast. Taught me some new ways of quiting an app. XMenu looks like a great little app. and should be very helpful for quickly getting to my programs, now that I properly installed it.

  • HandyMac

    I’m a big fan of XMenu also; I use the user-defined folder to maintain a list of over a dozen folders containing symlinks (preferred to aliases as they’re much smaller; I use the Symbolic Linker CMI to make them) to my second-tier apps as well as various kinds of documents. I had all this in the Apple menu in the classic Mac OS; when I switched to OS X 10.2 I got FruitMenu to do the same, but it was always a little slow building/showing its menu, and when it wasn’t updated for 10.5 I tried XMenu instead, and like it fine.

  • http://gilest.org Giles Turnbull

    Mark: indeed, don’t double click *any* app in its installer volume. Always drag it to your Applications folder first, and launch it from there.

  • sabreman

    @Mark: Why is that?

  • hichem

    it’s very good