As much as I hate to admit it, I remember Apple’s built-in Menubar navigation from Mac OS Classic. One click was all it took to find and open any app, file or volume.
Apple’s finite wisdom saw fit to launch OS X with a Dock instead of a system-wide Menubar navigation option, but you can get it back and it’s free.
Free And Easy
Apple gives Mac users all kinds of wonderful, useful, and much beloved applications. There’s Mail, Safari, Contacts, Calendar, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garageband, iPhoto, iMovie.
Thank you, Apple we appreciate your kindness. But what I really appreciate is a free gift that brings back the glory days of yesteryear.
Introducing XMenu. Alright, it’s been around in one form or another for a few years, but it’s still free, and it still works– even in OS X Mavericks.
XMenu adds a global menu to the right side of the Mac’s Menubar. Click and you get instant access to your favorite apps, folders, files, documents, and anything else.
You can configure XMenu to match your workflow, but there’s really nothing to configure.
It comes with six predefined folders which pretty much every Mac user has– Applications, Developer Apps, Home, Documents, User-Defined, and Snippets.
Everything you need to find a file, open a document, or launch an app is a mere click away with XMenu in the Menubar. Here’s what it looks like.
Simple, elegant, useful, fast, free. What more could you ask?
You can do something similar with the Dock by placing app and file or volume aliases into a folder and drag it to the Dock but XMenu is a more elegant solution.
immovableobject says
While it’s nice to have options, I find that using spotlight is usually more efficient than navigating a cascade of menus. Nevertheless, one can obtain nearly the same utility as XMenu by placing volumes on the right side of the dock and setting their options to display as folders with their contents as lists.