If you use something like Now Menus or Be Hierarchic (which both bring hierarchical menus to the Apple menu), you probably like the way they let you chose things like the Sound or Monitors control panels quickly.
However, things are still slower than they could be. First the Mac has to switch back to the Finder. It then starts up the control panel, which comes to the front. After making your selection you have to close the control panel, and again the Finder comes to the front. Then you have to go to the application menu and switch back to whatever it was you were doing before. These Fast switchers are a collection of tiny applications (not Control Panels, DAs, or FKeys like some other depth/volume switchers) to let you quickly swap between the setups you want. Keep the ones you need, and throw the rest away. They all have balloon help for their icons.
A collection of eight tiny applications that set the volume to a specific level, beep once, and instantly quit. I normally choose two of them, and stick them in my Apple menu. I name 'Volume 0' to be 'Sound Off' and 'Volume 1' (what I normally like it at) to be 'Sound On'.
Well, I change my monitor depth more often than I change my volume, so I wrote a corresponding set of applications to change monitor depth on the fly. Again, they're not Control Panels, DAs or FKeys (which take up memory) but six small (under 5K) applications. I normally have it at 256 colours when I'm working in the Finder (mono if I'm on a slow machine), and up to Thousands or Millions if I'm working with scanned images.
By default they switch to colour mode (if appropriate), but holding down the Command key when switching will force them to change to the appropriate gray scale. If they can't switch to the mode requested, they beep and then return. They do *not* alter the 'scrn' resource in the System file, so any changes are reset after the next reboot.
I'm a third year Computing Science/Philosophy student at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland. I won't be giving much support to these (they only took a weekend to knock up and I do have to study sometime :-), but feel free to drop me a line. Email me at grantd@dcs.gla.ac.uk. They have been tested on an LCII, a IIsi, a Quadra 950, a Quadra 700, and a IIcx - so far without problems. They should be OK for Macs with more than one display (never tried it though, so don't blame me if something horrible happens...).
