Filed under: Freeware, Open Source
AppMenuBoy: all your apps in your Dock
Over on the Office Google Mac Blog they're calling attention to simple little application from Google Mac Team member David Phillip Oster called AppMenuBoy. Basically, it will allow you to get one click access to all your applications by clicking on its Dock icon. David designed it to function like folders on the Dock did back in the good old Tiger days, when you could simply drag your Applications folder to the Dock to get a basic launcher. Though the 10.5.2 update improved things to some degree from the original Stacks behavior in Leopard, AppMenuBoy "shows only applications, follows aliases, and if a folder contains only an application, it silently 'hoists' that application in the menu so you don't have hierarchical menus that contain only a single icon."
AppMenuBoy is a free download from Google Code.
If you're like me, when you sit down at your Mac, you end up opening a few specific apps depending on what kind of project you're working on. I am going to show you how you can group these applications into "task launchers" that will bring up a suite of programs with one click. For instance, I have a script that will open iPhoto, iDVD, and iMovie called "Create Movies." When I run this script, it will open all of the applications I need to make my movie. I also have one called "Productivity" that will, when opened, launch Mail, iChat, Pages, and Yojimbo (even though some might argue with iChat's productivity value).
It seems like this news has been around for a while, but we'd never heard it, and it's definitely worth taking a look at. Alcor, developer of
Application launchers are diversifying in big ways, and it's great to see the market expanding. After discovering 


While there are
many full-featured launchers and dock alternatives available,
This morning 