The new control panel offers much more control over the physical appearance of the various FinderPop menus; for instance, your popup menus can now look like these:
 
Cool, huh? The leftmost menu has the FinderPop items embedded or inlined directly in the original contextual popup menu; both it and the topmost menu use Geneva 9 point with generic icons. The lower menu is using “real” icons with an 18 point Garamond font.
Here’s how you set ’em:
 
The revamped and simplified user interface is shown above; nothing too rocket science there! One new option is the ability to have the FinderPop menu items appear inlined directly in the primary contextual menu manager popup menu rather than in a submenu. I.e., the contents of the FinderPop Items Folder appear inside the main popup menu. In this case, if the FinderPop Items Folder is empty, then obviously nothing extra will be addded to the main popup. This should satisfy those people who didn’t want a FinderPop submenu. Weirdos. ;-) Another new option is to use generic icons; this can substantially speed up the building of the various popup menus as you navigate a hierarchy (since FinderPop doesn’t have to hit the disk for every item to find its icon.)
For those new to FinderPop, here’s a brief tour of the available features. Clicking the “Show FinderPop Items Folder” button does what you’d expect. The “Auto CMM Popup” slider controls the “click and hold” delay to automatically popup the Finder’s contextual menu — without having to press the Control key. Amazingly, some people are charging $9 for a similar utility which only does that, nothing more, and the amount of publicity they get surprises even as cynical an old sea-dog as me! Shades of Apple/Microsoft — to the best marketer the spoils…*
The Font/Size menu controls which font/size the CMM popup menu uses; note that using large or small font sizes in conjunction with small icons can result in some weird-looking popup menus. If generic icons are chosen, FinderPop uses the small ‘icm#’ icons (12 pixels high) which means these are well suited to small font sizes.
If you use “real” icons (as opposed to generic), each menu item will be at least 16 pixels high to ensure the icons get drawn properly (looks bizarre if the text is 9 point :-)
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* Footnote: I wrote the above when I was in a particularly grumpy mood, probably brought on by acute pangs of nicotine withdrawal. The product I’m referring to might even be worth the money! Sorry about that…
