FastScripts As Apple Menu

September 15th, 2008

Jim DeVona was feeling homesick recently for the old Apple menu on Mac OS 9 and earlier operating systems. For those of you too young (or too old!) to remember, the Apple icon in the upper-left corner of our Mac desktops used to contain a highly customizable list of files and applications, for easy access from wherever you might be on your Mac.

As an avid user of FastScripts, Jim noticed something about the application that I frankly should make a bigger deal out of myself:

A little-advertised fact about FastScripts is that it will open anything in your Scripts folder, not just scripts.

In short, FastScripts makes a pretty good replacement for the old Apple menu, if that’s what you’re in to. And in general, if you find yourself wanting to access the same documents, applications, or even (gasp!) scripts on a regular basis, FastScripts does a stellar job of organizing them and making them instantly accessible from the menu bar.

You can even add keyboard shortcuts to documents or applications that you put in the FastScripts scripts folders. And don’t worry about copying the actual files in, just make an alias pointing to the original!

Thanks, Jim, for drawing attention to this under-appreciated feature of FastScripts.