Now Menus

Now Menus is another one of those programs that you wonder how you lived without. Its primary function is simple, yet elegant. It provides hierarchical submenus from the DAs in the Apple menu. This in itself would not be so wonderful, but for its two special submenus. For the Chooser, you can have a submenu that lists your available Chooser devices, and if you hold down the command key while selecting one, it bypasses the Page Setup dialog and closes the Chooser for you automatically. Ah, joy and rapture (I hate waiting for the Chooser to open)! Used in conjunction with Print Previewer, this feature is amazingly useful. The other special submenu provides a list of the available Control Panel devices, which is also incredibly useful for people like me, with some 35 cdevs (no rude comments – I subscribe to the "he who dies with most wins" theory). I hate using the Control Panel on someone else’s machine when they don’t have Now Menus (or one of the previous shareware versions) installed. It seems so awkward to open the Control Panel and scroll down the list of cdevs, looking for the one you want. Along with Super Boomerang, this utility earns its keep every day with the submenus alone.

Now Menus has a couple of other helpful features which I use less. It can pop up a hierarchical menu that duplicates the standard menu bar anywhere on the screen, and there’s even a way to assign command keys to DAs and cdevs. If you have a mammoth 19" screen, the pop-up menu function would be more useful than I find it on my 9" and 13" monitors. But the Control Panel and Chooser submenus make the Mac so much less frustrating to use that Now Menus is an extremely welcome addition to my INIT lineup.