The Mac OS wants you to be able to find whatever you’re looking for, and gives you plenty of ways to do that. You can stash folders and applications in your Finder windows’ sidebar. You can leave aliases on your desktop. You can keep them in your Dock. You can call up a Spotlight window, type in a folder or application’s name, and launch it that way. And now you can keep an auto-populating list in your menu bar, thanks to TopHat Folders Menu and TopHat Apps Menu.
TopHat Apps Menu keeps all my apps handy…
Each of these utilities lives in your menu bar, and the drop-down menu is split into three panes: Favorites (which you choose), and the automatically populated Most Used and Recent. TopHat Apps Menu also adds All Applications at the bottom. TopHat Folders Menu shows each folder’s subfolders, and clicking one opens it in the Finder. Apps Menu, naturally, launches each app.
…but TopHat Folders Menu kept showing me folders only Microsoft Office ever really needs.
You can customize what appears in Options > Show Menu Editor, choosing a time frame for Recent items, and unchecking Most Used items you don’t want to see. But in my experience with Folders Menu, the Most Used folders area kept stubbornly showing me folders that my system writes to (iChat transcript folders and Microsoft User Data folders, for example) rather than folders I opened myself. The Recent folders area had folders I really did use, however, and I ran into no problems with Apps Menu since it limits itself to applications.
The bottom line. Each of these utilities has a free version in the Mac App Store that works exactly like the paid one, except you don’t have the option to kill the Dock icon and have it run solely in the menu bar. So if you need another way to access applications or folders, TopHat is definitely worth trying on.
piDog Software
pidog.com
Price: $3.99; Available in the Mac App Store
Requirements: Mac OS 10.6 or later
Pros: Handy menu bar access. Free trial.
Cons: Most Used list pulls in folders your system uses, not you.
piDog Software
pidog.com
Price: $3.99; Available in the Mac App Store
Requirements: Mac OS 10.6 or later
Pros: Free trial. Easy to use.
Cons: None, really.
