FinderPop adds a submenu to the MacOS 8 Finder’s Contextual Menus. This submenu behaves somewhat like the Apple Menu in that its contents are taken from a special “FinderPop Items” folder; you can add aliases of applications, servers, folders, etc., to this folder and they’ll appear in the FinderPop menu. Selecting a menu item is equivalent to launching the corresponding item in the “FinderPop Items” folder. Additionally, if you have something selected in the Finder and you choose an application from the FinderPop menu, the application will be told to open the items selected in the Finder.
The “FinderPop Items” folder lives in the Preferences folder, but clicking on the ‘Show “FinderPop Items” Folder…’ button in the FinderPop Control Panel will cause the Finder to display the folder window. Or just choose the “FinderPop” menu item in the contextual menu
(despite the fact that it’s a hierarchical menu, it can be selected.)
This is all harder to describe than to do. Just give it a try...
Note that FinderPop is not to be confused with Contextual Menu Manager plug-ins!
Installation
FinderPop requires Mac OS 8 and the Contextual Menus extension.
To install FinderPop, just drop it into your Control Panels folder, or drop it onto the closed system folder icon and let the Finder autoroute it. After you restart, FinderPop should be installed. Clicking the “Show FinderPop Items Folder…” button will bring the “FinderPop Items” folder frontmost, and allow you to add or remove items from the folder (and subsequently the "FinderPop" submenu.)
FreeWare
FinderPop is free, and can be included on magazine and Info-Mac CDs, etc. That said, I’d be delighted to accept any cool CDs / Jack Vance books / t-shirts / postcards / bottles of beer / promises of firstborn, etc. — it would make the hours I spent furtling around in Macsbug grappling in vain with CFM68K seem worthwhile (address below.) Failing that, an email would be nice. Ultimately, of course, your sticking with Apple would be best of all! :-)
While you're reading this, I’ll just plug my other freebie menu-related utility, Popup Navigator (available on Info-Mac.)
NB This is not an official Apple-supported product.
Known Bugs (“Features”)
• There can be an initial delay while FinderPop builds up its cache of menu items and icons. If you place an alias to your hard disk in the “FinderPop Items” folder, expect an substantial delay. Provided nothing has changed the next time you Control-click, the delay will be minimal. (FinderPop caches the last modification date for the “FinderPop Items” folder and any folders it contains — either directly or via aliases — and, each time the menu is about to be displayed, checks that its cached menu hierarchy has the same mod dates as those on the disk.)
• Choosing a folder from the FinderPop menu simply opens that folder in the Finder. Future versions of FinderPop will allow copying or moving whatever’s selected in the Finder to the chosen folder.
• FinderPop currently has no knowledge about which documents are openable by which applications, so it may be possible to ‘open’ a document using an inappropriate application. This will also be fixed in a future version (i.e., applications which can’t open what’s selected in the Finder will be disabled in the FinderPop menus.)
• 68K support? Coming as soon as I figure out what’s really going on down in the bowels...
• Plotting colour icons in the FinderPop submenu -- things might look a tad strange in right-to-left text systems due to the skanky method I use to draw the icons for folders. As soon as I get around to locating a right-to-left MacOS 8 system, I'll do further testing.
• Any item inside the "FinderPop Items" folder whose name ends in "-***" is considered to be a menu dividing line, following the convention set by James Walker's OtherMenu INIT. Extending that convention somewhat, any folder (or alias to one) whose name ends in "-!!X" will not be expanded (i.e., there will be no submenu hanging off it.)
If you’re having problems using FinderPop, contact me and I will do my best to fix it.
<mailto: "Turlough O'Connor" turly@apple.com>
Have Fun!
--turly
Turlough O'Connor, Apple Computer Ltd., Cork, IRELAND turly@apple.com
