Apollo is an application launcher, a program which lets you launch other programs. You select an application from its pop-up menu and Apollo starts that application just as if you had double-clicked its icon in the Finder. Apollo will also let you attach documents to an application in its menu: choosing a document launches the application and tells it to open the document, similar to the action taken by the Finder when you double-click a document.
Apollo is modelled on On Cue from Icom Simulations, a utility I found indispensible until I acquired system 7. On Cue (at least, v1.3 of On Cue) doesn't work properly under system 7 and sometimes crashes. Apollo requires system 4.1 or greater and works just fine under system 7. Apollo also adds a few features which On Cue doesn't have (and will add many more in the future).
The main extra feature is the concept of a group. A group is a named list of applications which appears in a submenu off the main menu. This lets you have access, via Apollo, to many applications you use less frequently without cluttering up your main menu and making it more difficult to use. Group names appear in Apollo's main menu in italic.
Apollo is a system extension (or INIT, for pre-7 folks). To install it, drag it to your system folder and restart your Mac (anyone running system 7 should let the Finder put Apollo in the Extensions folder within the system folder). If all is well, Apollo's icon will appear on the screen as your Mac starts up and Apollo will draw a miniature version of its icon at the right-hand end of the menu bar. If all is not well, Apollo's icon will have a large X through it and you had better talk to me.
Once Apollo is running, you use it by clicking on its icon in the menu bar or at the very top-left corner of your main screen, whereupon Apollo's menu will appear. (You can also get Apollo to pop up its menu anywhere on screen if you click while holding down a modifier key or two: see later).
• To launch an application, just choose it from the menu.
• To launch it with a document, choose the document from the application's submenu.
• To launch an application that isn't in the list, choose "Other application…" from the menu.
• To launch an existing application with a document that isn't in its submenu, hold down the option key as you choose the application.
Initially, Apollo's menu is empty of applications and looks like this:
The apple menu item contains desk accessories, if you're running a system before 7, and the items from your apple menu if you're running system 7 (the distinction is subtle, but real).
As you add applications to Apollo, they appear in the main menu. If you create groups, they also appear in the main menu, but in italic, with a submenu hanging off each one containing its applications. If you attach documents to an application, Apollo creates a submenu for that application, containing the documents.
Configuring Apollo means telling it which applications you want to keep in your menu and which, if any, documents you want to attach to them. When you choose Configure… from the Apollo submenu, you'll see this dialog box:
It looks rather complex, but isn't really.
On the left are the items you see whenever you open a file on the Mac: the list of files, the folder popup, the volume name and the buttons. Initially, only applications are shown in the file list.
The middle list shows all applications Apollo knows about, whether they're in the main menu or one of the groups you've created. If an application is selected in this list, the rightmost list shows the documents attached to that application, the popup menu at the top right shows the group the application is in and the file list shows not only all applications but also all that application's documents.
To add an application to Apollo's list, double-click it in the file list and it will appear, selected, in the application list. The file list will change to show the application's documents. To keep things a little clearer, the message at the bottom tells you which files are shown in the file list. A new application is always added initially to the main menu, but if you want to move an application to a different group, just select it in the application list and choose the group from the popup at the top right. "Main menu" is a pseudo-group meaning, amazingly, the main menu: you can't call a group "Main menu".
To add a document to an application's submenu, select the application in the application list and double-click the document in the file list. If, for some reason, you want to add an application to another application's menu, you must hold down the option key as you double-click it (because double-clicking an application normally adds it to the application list). If you want to add a document to an application's list and the document wasn't created by that application, you must check the "Show all files" check box so the document will show up in the file list.
To remove an application or a document, select it from the appropriate list and click on the appropriate remove button. As a shortcut, you could double-click the item in the list. Beware that deleting an application immediately deletes its entire document list and is not "undoable" (none of the actions in this dialog is undoable, in fact).
To create or delete groups, click on the Groups button and this dialog will appear:
To create a group, type its name and click Add. To delete a group, select it and click Remove, or double-click its name. As mentioned above, you can't create a group called "Main menu".
If you try to delete a group which contains applications, you'll get a warning like this:
The options here are pretty clear, I think.
Finally, you can tweak a few of Apollo's features by choosing Preferences… from the Apollo submenu. You'll get this dialog box:
Again, the options are pretty self-explanatory. Even if you choose not to draw the menu bar icon, clicking in the top right corner will still activate Apollo (you can't turn that off). The active area in the top left corner is only five dots square, so the pointer must be right in the corner when you click. The hieroglyphics next to the check boxes mean, from left to right, the command, shift, option and control keys (they come from Apple's MacroMaker, so any complaints about comprehensibility should be directed at Apple, not me).
If you're not running MultiFinder, Apollo has to persuade your current application to quit before it can launch another. It does this by conning it into thinking that you've chosen Quit from the application's File menu. At the moment, Apollo isn't very flexible about how it does this: if Quit isn't the last item in the second menu from the left, you'll get a message saying that Apollo couldn't find the Quit command. Under these circumstances, quit your current application manually, which will return you to the Finder, and Apollo will then work normally (it treats the Finder specially). I hope to improve this in due course.
If you use Larry Rosenstein's Application Menu INIT and you are not running under system 7, you should ensure that Apollo loads after Application Menu. One way of doing this is to rename Application Menu to !Application Menu.
If you have a Radius monitor and are using Radius's tear off menus, you must uncheck the "top left corner active" option in the Preferences dialog. Otherwise, Apollo's menu will pop up whenever you click on a torn-off menu.
I have many improvements to Apollo in mind, including all the features of AppSwitcher7 (another extension I have written, which is free! from all good ftp sites…) and adding sets of applications which are launched together, so you could, for example, launch Cricket Graph, MacDraw and Microsoft Word, with their documents, with a single mouse click.
I hope you enjoy using Apollo and find it useful. Please let me know if you find any bugs, have any (constructive) comments or just have fun with it.
