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"Apple Menu"

The Apple Menu, a convenient way of locating items on your computer, can be easily customized for your personal use.

Apple Menu

The Apple Menu, located in the upper left hand corner of your screen, is more than just a pretty apple icon. It can become a powerful tool, making navigating your Mac even simpler than it is already.

Items in the Apple Menu are automatically arranged in alphabetical order.

Aliases of frequently used items, placed in the Apple Menu, can provide quick and easy acces to those items.

The information you see in the Apple Menu is actually stored in a special folder within your System Folder appropriately called the Apple Menu Items folder. Anything you place in this folder will appear in the Apple Menu.

Quick access to Apple Menu Items:

I can drag and drop additions to the Apple Menu directly on this alias without having to open the System Folder to find it. I can also just click on this alias to access the Apple Menu Items folder for a quick personal update or arrangement.

NOTE: I reduce the name of the Apple Menu Items alias to a single "A" to keep the "clutter" on the desktop to a minimum (and to thwart visitors to my computer by not making this item readily identifiable to them).

My Apple Menu

Important items at the top: The Apple Menu automatically organizes itself alphabetically but it does not discriminate between important/frequenty used items and lesser items (the computer doesn't know what is more/less important to you) and just arranges everything alphabetically. NOTE: At the left is the first screen of my personalized Apple Menu. Following are technics that I have used to "personalize" this menu for my own use. ASIDE: Notice the first item in the Apple Menu - It contains some valuable information about your computer - Try it out and know where to find it! Basic technic: There is a users "trick" that can take advantage of this alphabetizing trait of the computer for personal choices. PRINCIPLE: Spaces are alphabetized before certain special characters, before numbers, before letters in the computers hierarchical order. (i.e. "blank space" comes before a "bullet" comes before a "number" comes before an "a"). Simply place a space before the file name and it will jump to the top of an alphabetical list. Place a "z" at the beginning of a file name and it will go to the end of the list. Apple Menu Application: NOTE: I will show you how to created four levels of order in your Apple Menu. Open the Apple Menu Items, Select an item in the list (click once on a item) that you wish to be near the top of the list. Put your cursor at the beginning of the file name and press the space bar two times. Hit the return key and the item jumps to the top of your list. Continue this process with items you wish to be in the upper level of the Apple Menu. Create a second level of the Apple Menu by placing one space at the beginning of the file name. A third level is the normal menu item A fourth level can easily be created by placing a "z" at the beginning of a file name (no quote marks please)! You have now personalized your Apple Menu for your own convenience with more important items at the top where they can be quickly accessed. You can experiment and personalize even more by using other special characters at the beginning of files names. Try placing a "bullet" at the beginning of a file name (you know - hold down the "option" key and type "8"). Have fun with this!!! Create Separators: Notice the lines that separate "personal categories" in My Apple Menu. I find it even clearer to draw a "separator" between these levels or categories in the Apple Menu. Here is how I do it: Open the Apple Menu Items folder, Create a "New Folder" (you know - command n or File menu/New Folder) and title it "__________" (no quotes). Hit the return key and see where it goes. Create more of these but place a space at the beginning of the title. These appear as separators between your categories of files. The "folder icon" is personally offensive to me so I use another "user trick" to hide the folder icon. Open a simple paint program (I continue to use the old MacPaint application for this but one can use SuperPaint, or a paint document in ClarisWorks in the same way). Use the selection tool to draw a rectangular area (size is not too important). Copy this area (you know - command c or Edit menu/Copy) Go back to the Apple Menu Items folder Click once on the folder icon of one of the "separator" lines, Get Info (you know - command i or File menu/Get Info) Click in the "icon" area at the upper left of the window that opens and Paste in the "white space" that you copied from the paint program (you know - command v or Edit menu/Paste) Close this "Get Info" open window and you will notice that the "folder icon" is hidden (replaced with "white space"). Do the same for any icon that you wish to hide in any directory. You have learned a way to keep an item hidden from view in any menu.

Special Apple Menu Items:

1. Some personal favorites include two AppleScript items called S3 and S6 (for Sound Level 3 and Sound Level 6). I like to have the sound level higher for playing games and at much more gentle level for normal word processing/destop publishing use of my computer.

   For a higher sound level, I select S6 in the Apple Menu and the AppleScript runs to change the level of sound (you will hear a beep when it its finished).
   HINT: I also place an alias of S3 in my Startup Items folder (in the System Folder) so the sound level is automatically set to a desirable level when I start my computer.

2. I keep an alias of my Address Book, Simple Text, and other basic applications that I need to open while working on a larger project.

   Simple Text provides a quick "storage" place for cut text in another applications although Notepad can do the same thing.

3. I personally like some of the search and replace tools in Microsoft Works 3 so I like that available in my Apple Menu for a copy/paste operation to reorder and rearrange text.

4. A valuable application in my Apple Menu (less now with Apple's change to non SCSI hard drives, etc.) is SCSIProbe 4.3

Careful - there may be a Slow Down of your computer:

Aliases of large folders/directories can slow down the "boot time" of your computer. (i.e. an alias of your Hard Drive - not recommended - requires the computer to retain and refresh a directory of your hard drive which can cause annoying slowdowns.)

Be conservative in the use of aliases of large folders/directories in the Apple Menu which force the computer CPU to refresh and occupy precious CPU time.

I even reduce the size of the Recent Applications (3), Recent Documents (3) and Recent Servers (2) folders for this reason (this is accomplished in the Apple Menu Options Control Panel).
Some users even turn this Apple Menu Option feature OFF.

I rarely put an alias of a folder in the Apple Menu. (The Control Panels folder is automatically installed though and I leave this one in the Apple Menu.)

Try adding applications and commonly used folders to the Apple Menu.

Remember that the more spaces you add to the beginning of a file's name the closer to the top it will appear. (Thus, "space-space Apple" appears before "space Aardvark.")

dthomas@pclink.com

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