Well, I actually got the idea from Windows. I noticed that the menu I got when I right-clicked on the background of a folder window had a "New" submenu with various document types, and I found myself wishing I had that on my Mac. Well, hey, I'm a programmer!
What to do
Part 1: Preparation
- Drag NewCM onto your System Folder (the Finder redirects it to the Contextual Menu Items folder)
- Open up the Contextual Menu Items folder and make a new folder inside it called "NewCM Items"
- Put some files in the NewCM Items folder - whatever kinds of files you find yourself creating most often. Then restart your computer.
Part 2: Usage
- Control-click on the background of a folder window in the Finder. There will be a "New" submenu, which lists the document types of the files you put in the NewCM Items folder. Important note: normally, the document types are listed (like "ClarisWorks word processing doc"), not their names. But they are listed alpabetically accorting to the file names. This means that, through clever renaming, you can put the more popular types at the top of the list.
- Select an item from the submenu. You will be prompted for a file name (with the orignal file's name as the default), and the file will be copied to the folder and then opened.
Part 3: Extra options
- If you want the name of a template file to be used in the menu instead of its kind, add an exclamation point to the end of the name.
- If you don't want the new file to be opened (which you might want, say, for a font suitcase), you can add a minus sign at the end of the name of the file in NewCM items.
- If you use both the exclamation point and the minus sign, the exclamation point should come last. For example: "Frosty document-!"
- Useful for re-ordering the files in the menu: If the third character of the file name is ')', then the first three will not be displayed.
- If a file (or folder) name ends in '-***', then a divider will be displayed in the menu instead of that file or folder (folders aren't normally displayed at all). You can combine this with the above ordering trick as well.
By the way, you don't need to restart after making changes to the NewCM Items folder. And yes, those last two features were inspired by FinderPop and OtherMenu (which I use!).
Odd notes
If the name of a file type can't be determined, then the name of the original file is displayed. This happens for some reason with font suitcases, and may occur with other file types as well. If you find a file type that NewCM doesn't display right and you think it should be able to, let me know. I'm working on a system for taking care of known problem types.
I'm just getting started
The current version of NewCM is just a basic implementation of the idea; I plan to make it more sophisticated in future releases. Keep an eye out!
Ideas for future versions:
- Allow folder templates as well - the folder and all its contents will be copied over to the new location.
- As mentioned above, keep an internal list of file types that can't be determined at runtime.
- I'll probably add a control panel to make managing all this stuff easier. After all, those exclamation points and minus signs are kind of ugly.
- Got any ideas? My e-mail address is listed below!
Money?
Yes! NewCM isn't quite free - I ask a fee of $9, which you can pay using the enclosed Register program or on-line (see below). If you don't think it's worth it, well, as you can see above, it wiill be!
Version history
1.1
- NewCM now does its magic on the desktop.
- It makes sure that the new file is not stationery. Files in the NewCM Items folder shouldn't be stationery anyway.
- Added support for aliases in the NewCM Items folder.
