I love Apple’s Finder: since I switched from Windows to Mac OS X, Finder has slowly become my favourite app. It’s pretty obvious - I know - but I just can’t stop thinking about how things were ugly, hard and non-user-friendly when I used Explorer.
With the release of Snow Leopard the Finder has been completely re-written in Cocoa, fully supporting 64-bit. For this reason now we have live previews, more core animation goodness, more stability, more everything. But Finder is - and always will be, I believe - a “dock app”.
And here comes MenuBrowser.
As the developer Adam Warsky says on his website “Menu Browser is a small utility program which lets you quickly and easily browse and open your files and folders, without distracting you from your current tasks”: indeed, MenuBrowser simply installs a small and nice menubar icon which lets you browse the content of your home folder.
As you can see from the screen, you can browse folders and files by simply clicking on MenuBrowser red icon (although I would like to choose between a red / black version of this icon). Clicking outside of the area will then close the menu. Simple and effective.
The good thing about MenuBrowser is that you can customize everything: you can assign whichever folder or subfolder you like to the menu, display basic information about the files you’re viewing (metadata) or even assign custom actions scripts (Applescript), which by default are “Send as Mail attachment” and “Open With..”.
During the tests for this review I found MenuBrowser a very useful menubar app which saved me a lot of time. For future updates, I wish the developer will take dull advantage of 64-bit and Snow Leopard by supporting drag & drop and live previews.
MenuBrowser is shareware, meaning that comes fully functional with occasional reminders. A full copy can be purchased at the price of $5 here.
A great price for a very good little piece of software.
