An elegant menu bar utility.

Xmenu is a handy menu bar utility which allows you to place your favorite apps in a menu dropdown box for rapid access. With two 30″ Apple Cinema Displays in use, along with the seeming acres of space they provide, I find using the Dock is less easy than accessing the drop down box provided by Xmenu.

Xmenu can be downloaded free form the AppStore here.

By default it shows every app on your Mac which makes it useless:

Just one of many pages in the default view – useless.

However, a quick peek at the help guide discloses that Xmenu is easily tailored to show just your favorites.

My User directory is named ‘Tigger’ and after you first start Xmenu you navigate to this directory:

The directory for the aliases of your favorite apps.

Back in your Applications directory you make aliases of your favorite apps (right click the mouse and click on ‘Make Alias’ then Control-drag these aliases to the Custom directory above. That will move (rather than copy) them over to the Xmenu Custom directory. You can then rename these aliases anything you want, mine looking like this:

Xmenu favorites in the Favorites directory.

Next in the menu bar drop down, go to Xmenu->Preferences and check the boxes as shown:

Now when you click the menu bar dropdown icon (which will have changed to a small cogged wheel) you will see just your favorites, with a click booting the app of choice:

Xmenu favorite apps in the dropdown menu.

Elegant, fast, accessible …. and free. What’s not to like?