Questions and Answers

Q.  How do I add my own clippings to the Paste Clips submenu?

A.  For any OtherMenu external, you open the about box or configuration dialog by selecting the external with the shift key held down.

Q.  Why doesn’t OtherMenu show icons in its menu?

A.  Finding a file’s icon takes a significant amount of time.  If I looked up the icons each time I built a submenu, it would take an annoyingly long time for the menu to appear.  An alternative approach used by some menu utilities is to maintain a private database of icons.  This takes up disk space, and various problems can occur if the database becomes damaged.  So, I prefer to keep it simple.  Of course if you want to see a few icons, you can use the “instant info” feature.

Q.  Why doesn’t OtherMenu allow me to set command key equivalents for its menu items?

A.  Partly it’s a desire to keep it simple, as in the answer to the previous question.  And partly, I don’t understand the need.  As I see it, if you are the sort of person who likes to do everything with the keyboard, then you should buy a macro program like QuicKeys, KeyQuencer, or Tempo.  These programs can create keyboard macros for launching applications and documents, so there would be no need to have keyboard equivalents to normal OtherMenu menu items.  You can also use KeyQuencer or QuicKeys to open OtherMenu externals.

Q.  Every few minutes, I hear some disk activity for no apparent reason.  Is that OtherMenu’s doing?

A.  It’s probably the “update cache in background” feature.  If it bothers you, turn it off.

Q.  Why isn’t there an option to put the menu on the left end of the menu bar, next to the Apple menu, instead of the right end?

A.  OtherMenu uses the system-wide menu mechanism that Apple introduced for the help menu and application menu.  Putting the menu elsewhere would require a completely different technique and would make compatibility problems more likely.

Q.  I love menus.  Can’t get enough of them.  Is there any way to run two copies of OtherMenu, so I can have two extra menus?

A.  Yes.  After making a copy of OtherMenu, you would have to open the copy with a resource editor and change the 'STR ' 128 resource.  Of course this is inefficient, because two copies of OtherMenu’s code will be loaded into the system.  Eventually I might make OtherMenu able to handle more than one OtherMenu Folder and display more than one menu, but I don’t consider it a high priority.

Q.   I paid the shareware fee, honest I did, but I still get these occasional shareware reminders.  Why won’t you tell me the secret key or registration code or whatever to turn them off?

A.  OK, here is the secret:  Open the preferences dialog, and check the “I paid” checkbox.

Q.   Are there any “Easter eggs” in the Manual Reader application?

A.  Yes, one.