MainMenu (Nifty App!)★
Every now and then one comes across a very nifty app and feels a desire to spread the love. Well, I stumbled across MainMenu ( http://www.santasw.com/ ) a while ago but being an emotional chunk of granite and well, you know, qu'est-que c'est? L'amour? C'est quoi?Information you need to know first: MainMenu is made by the folks at santasw.com, its free, beautiful, and completely essential (for me anyway).
MainMenu will perform things like health checks, restart the dock, restart finder, clean caches, clean log files, repair permissions, and much (oh so much) more.
After installing, a little icon will appear up by the nether-nether land of the airport and bluetooth menu, and of course, spotlight. MainMenu allows you to choose what icon you want to appear (and since i've changed mine i have no idea what the default one actually was) It should all look something like this:
The icon to the left of the bluetooth icon is my MainMenu icon.Clicking the icon reveals the great looking gui.
From here everything is at your finger tips. Dock acting up? - Restart it:
Same goes for toggling showing of invisible files in finder.
Check out the options under 'Other Tasks':
Advanced users might create maintenance scripts to run say, a log clean out every Friday afternoon. MainMenu can hide or show its log window ( it remembers your settings ) which looks something like this during a permissions check:
There is no aspect of this app that disappoints me, aside from its decided inability to make me a turkey sandwich. ( Please add this at some point Devs. )Though roughly recommend using this app, check it out at
http://www.santasw.com/
Happy Mac'ing.
★ 6 Comments. | By Skippy, Tuesday, February 20, 2007 7:44 PM | Links to this post
What about Onyx ? It does the same things, for the same price. I've been using it for several years, so it's working alright and keeping up-to-date, whereas I haven't been able to reach santasw.com.
By: 
Hey Jeanpeutplus. You're right about santasw.com. I haven't been able to update the mactake within the last day or so but if i had I would have mentioned that with the new 10.4.9 update, Mainmenu has ceased to work.
The benefits of MainMenu compared to Onyx lie in the fact that its an easy to grab, easy to use menu button, where as Onyx is really a full powered application.
Not to seem to fence-sitting, but in all honesty I used both up till the 10.4.9 update, and if MainMenu updates to fix its troubles I'll continue to do that!
Thanks for your thoughts Jeanpeutplus! Appreciate you dropping in to the MacTake. You're welcome to submit any content at any time, we'd love to have your opinions/tips/ideas.
I'll be covering Onyx in a post soon!
Skippy.
By: 
Skippy
hi, I've just downloaded 'mainmenu' as my macbook was starting to behave funny. I did it as a response to mac maintenance articles and tips. Do I still need 'Janitor' or 'preferential treatment' a program that checks preference files when I have mainmenu? From what i see Mainmenu seems to do all of of what Mac Janitor can do and more?
By: Narayani
You know, I think you're spot on there. As far as I can tell MainMenu does everything Janitor or preferential treatment do anyway. But I haven't taken an in-depth look at the apps. You might as well install MainMenu, appzap (delete) the other two and if you suddenly run into anything you can't do with MainMenu, revert back.
An update has also been released to include full leopard support.
By: Skippy
Hi Skippy, thanxs 4 the fast reply. I'm not an expert in the tech stuff and i will need to learn how to use mainmenu. There is a lot I simply don't understand and I don't really know what things mean, like update database or execute batch tasks.. Say what?.
English isn't even my 1st language 4 starters. Is there anywhere where I can read all about mainmenu's functioning 'for dummies' like me?? or is it your joy to help good users that are non-techies ?
Thanxs sofar ;-))
Narayani
By: Narayani
No problem Narayani, don't think for a second that I know what I'm doing all the time either. I found some of MainMenu's options a little cryptic, I'm sure if you want, you can read their user guide on santasw.com.
I can however, give you a basic rule of thumb. If things seem a little slow on your mac, apps behaving strangely etc: Click on the mainmenu icon, then go down to Maintenance Scripts, and then click Weekly (If this doesn't help, click Monthly).
Useful tasks to perform are:
Under Disk Utility:
Repair Disk Permissions. (Not OS9 Permissions.)
Under "Finder"
Secure Empty Trash (Delete file forever, no sensible recovery options using nifty software etc).
Restart Finder:
If finder crashes, etc, use this.
Restart Dock:
Dock not working? Use this to fix it. Real useful.
Under "Other Tasks"
Force Empty Trash (Ever get a message telling you such and such a file you trashed was in use? But you knew it shouldn't be? Use this function to bazooka it).
Restart System Menu Bar
If anything like the bluetooth and airport icons aren't working etc, use this to fix it.
Hope you have good luck with the software, I certainly find it very useful. It's more of something you leave alone to sit up in its corner till something goes wrong, and you think you could use it.
Apologies for the quiet blog, I've basically put the entire blog on hold till I get Leopard, and till I get room to breathe!
All the best,
Skip
By: Skippy
