Apple Menu Tips


The Apple Menu on your Mac is a very powerful tool. By doing a few simple things you can make working on your Mac much easier.

The Basics

Items in your Apple Menu are located in a folder named "Apple Menu Items" within your System Folder. Anything that is placed in this folder will show up in your Apple Menu. Items in your Apple menu are arranged in alphabetical order. Knowing this allows you to arrange the items in your Apple menu. Some thing that makes this easier is the fact that non-alpha-numeric characters fall above and below the alphabet. (Without going too far indepth, the order starts with "space" and goes through most of the non-alpha-numeric characters then the numerals, alphabet and ends with "odd" characters [*,+,-,.,=, 0-9,a-Z, {insert charaters that fall outside normal}]) I'll try to find a definitive list and post it.

A good tool for organizing your Apple Menu Items is Amico

Another thing to remember is, whenever possible, use aliases in the Apple Menu. Some applications, such as FrameMaker or any Microsoft product, need to be kept in the same folder as their support files in order to fully function. By making an alias of the items that you want to put into your Apple Menu, you also leave your actual File Organization intact.

Example

Here is what is in my Apple Menu Items folder:
  • >Applications - [An alias of my Applications folder]
  • >Documents - [An alias of my Documents folder]
  • >Incoming! - [An alias of my Incoming! folder (Eudora Attachments & more)]
  • >Utilities - [An alias of my Utilities folder]
  • Apples - [All of the items that Apple puts in the Apple Menu. (i.e. Calculator, etc.)]
  • Chooser - [the Chooser]
  • Control Panels - [An alias of the Control Panels folder. (you already have this one.)]
  • Recent Applications - [A list maintained by Apple Menu Options. (Part of System 7.5)]
  • Recent Servers - [A list maintained by Apple Menu Options. (Part of System 7.5)]
  • ~Boot - [The Boot partition of my Hard Drive]
  • ~Tao - [The working partiton of my Hard Drive]
  • ~Zen - [The other Partition of my Hard Drive]
  • With the exception of the Chooser, all of these items are Folders. Most of them are aliases of folders on my Hard Drive. This may seem odd, but I am using System 7.5 and my Apple Menu is Hierarchial so this method gives me complete access to my files without cluttering up my Apple Menu with Items that I only rarely use.

    jjh@macdude.com
    Last Modified - Feb-11-1997