ACTION Menus is the latest addition to Power On Software's popular line of ACTION Utilities. Those of you familiar with the more or less defunct Now Utilities suite, which many of the ACTION Utilities are based on, will immediately recognize ACTION Menus. Like the other ACTION Utilities, though, ACTION Menus offers a sleu of new features and improvements.
ACTION Menus is designed to make navigating and accessing items on your Mac faster and easier than before. This is achieved through five new menus, designated by small icons, that are added to the menu bar along with other less visible features.
A small triangle to the left of the Apple menu keeps track of recent applications while a similar menu to the right of the Application menu keeps track of recent documents and folders that all applications have used. A small drive icon to the right of the menu bar clock offers quick hierarchical access to mounted volumes and recent servers, although like all other menus, it can only scan five folders deep due to a limitation in the Mac OS. The two other new menus, located to the left of the Help menu, offer quick access to recent documents and folders that the foreground application has used along with a list of all open windows in that application. You can also add, customize, and remove menus from the menu bar through the ACTION Utilities control panel.
Beyond additional menus, ACTION Menus allows you to easily assign a command key combination to any menu action within the Finder. Simply enter your desired combination while the action is selected and ACTION Menus takes care of the rest. Command-T, for example, can be assigned to the Empty Trash...action, forgoing other more complicated utilities that patch the Finder in order to accomplish this feat.
One of the most convenient features of ACTION Menus is its impressive implementation of drag and drop. You can add any item to the Apple menu by simply dragging it to the menu. Documents that are dragged on top of applications contained within the Apple menu will be opened with that application. Of course, this feature isn't limited to the Apple Menu alone, it can also be used with the other menus that are part of ACTION Menus. This feature becomes even more useful when used in conjunction with the Drives menu, which allows you, for example, to place an item on your desktop into a folder nested three levels deep in a drive without having to open a single folder. This is file management at its best.
Other features that ACTION Menus sports include the ability to open or quit items in the Application, Recent Application, or Recent Documents menus by simply selecting them and entering O or Q, respectively. You can also remove items from any menu with a similar technique, only using the Delete key instead. You can turn any item in the Recent Applications or Recent Documents menus into a favorite by selecting the file and pressing the space bar. Favorite items remain in the menu until you turn them back into regular items or delete them, and the do not count towards the file limit you've set for recent items.
There are a handful of other actions that can be invoked through the keyboard while an item in a menu is a selected. While all of these different features may seem difficult to remember, familiarizing yourself with ACTION Menus is easier that you would think. To ease this process, a small window appears each time your start up your Mac with a new tip for using ACTION Menus. You can cycle through all the tips or choose to not have that dialog box appear anymore.
Unlike Now Menus or the entire Now Utilities suite that was notorious for causing your Mac to crash, we experienced no stability issues while using ACTION Menus. Our one gripe with the utility is that Power On didn't find a way to get around the five level deep restriction on folder navigation through a menu, something that others have proven is possible.
ACTION Menus represents another excellent utility to come out of Power On Software, and one that most Mac users will appreciate.
