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 lot of 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. If you're running system 7, Apollo also allows you immediate access to desk accessories, control panels and folders, even if they're not in the Apple Menu Items folder.
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 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, and you can tell it at which ends of the menu bar to draw its icon: see later).
• To launch an application, desk accessory or control panel, or to open a folder, just choose it from the menu.
• To launch an application 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.
If the application you're launching is already running, Apollo will bring it to the front. If you choose a document and its application is already running, Apollo will bring the application to the front and try to persuade it to open that document. Usually it will succeed (it does it by conning the application into believing that you've chosen Open… from its File menu and then telling it which file to open), but sometimes it won't. If Apollo can't persuade your application to open the document, it will put up an alert like this:
It's similar to the alert the Finder uses when it fails under similar circumstances.
Initially, Apollo's menu is empty 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, desk accessories, control panels or folders 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. The application's group is draw in small text underneath each one. If you click on the downward-pointing arrow to the left of the group name, a menu pops up which you can use to move the application to a different group. If an application is selected in this list, the rightmost list shows the documents attached to that application 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).
The popup menu showing "Applications" in the figure lets you choose whether you're configuring applications, desk accessories, control panels or folders. (If you're not running system 7, only the Applications selection is available). If you choose a different item from this popup, the centre list changes to show all items of whatever it is that you've chosen (such as folders) and their groups, and the contents of the dotted box on the right also change.
If you choose to configure desk accessories, the dotted box looks like this:
The leftmost list shows files likely to contain DAs. If you open one (by double-clicking), the DAs it contains show up in the list on the right. Selecting one and clicking "Add to menu" adds the DA to Apollo's main menu: double-clicking it has the same effect. If you check the "Auto-add" box, all DAs in a file will automatically be added to the main menu when the file is opened.
If you choose to configure control panels, the dotted box is empty.
If you choose to configure folders, the box looks like this:
The list shows the folder currently selected (up to 5 levels deep, it shows all levels: more than 5 levels deep and the middle line is replaced by "…".
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". To rename a group, select it and click Rename (in case you're feeling sneaky, don't bother trying to rename a group to "Main menu" either. I've thought of that).
An alternative way of creating a group is to click the "Build group" button in the main configuration dialog. This will create a new group, give it the same name as the folder you have open in the file selection box and put all the items of the type you're currently configuring into it. If the group already exists, the items are merged into it. So, for example, if you want to have all your control panels in a group, choose "Control Panels" from the Configuring: menu, navigate your way to the folder where you keep your control panels (let's call it, oh, Control Panels, just for argument's sake) and click "Build group". A group called Control Panels will be created and all the control panels you have in that folder will appear in it. The same mechanism works for applications and desk accessories as well (but not for folders: sorry).
If you try to delete a group which isn't empty, you'll get a warning like this:
The options here are pretty clear, I think. If you choose to move the items, they'll only be put in the main menu if they aren't already there. If an application is in both the group to be deleted and the main menu, and has document submenus, the two submenus will be merged.
When you rename a group, you'll get this dialog:
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. The "Active top corners" popup gives you the options none, left, right and both. If the active area is "icon-sized", you must click on the icon itself (or the space where the icon would be, if you choose to have an active corner with no icon) to activate Apollo: if it's "full height", the active area is the width of the icon but extends from the top of the screen to the bottom of the menu bar. This option avoids conflicts with some other extensions (notably PopChar). The "Menu bar icon" popup has similar options to the "Active top corners" one: none, at right-hand end, at left-hand end and at both ends. Changing the drawing of the menu bar icon may automatically change the active top corners, since if you want an icon, you must have that corner active. So if you have the active corner set to right and you choose to draw the icon at the left hand end, Apollo will set the active corners to "both". If the "auto drop-down" box is checked, moving your mouse pointer over an active corner will make Apollo's menu appear even if you aren't holding down the button. I hate this feature, personally, but several people requested it, so it's there. It's only an option, after all. If you check the "pop up menu anywhere while holding" box, Apollo's menu will appear when you hold down the specified modifier keys and click the mouse button. 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 click on the "Application switching preferences" button, the dialog undergoes a substantial change, to look like this:
If you check the "include" box, and you're running system 7 (or MultiFinder), Apollo will generate a menu of currently-running applications, with their icons if you check the "with icons" box. It will add this to the Apollo menu, either as a submenu at the top called "Current Apps" if the "as submenu" radio button is chosen, or as a list at the top of the main menu, if the "at top of main menu" button is selected. You can also choose to have this menu appear independently anywhere on the screen if you click while holding down a combination of modifier keys: these can't be the same modifiers as you've chosen for the main menu, for obvious reasons.
"Keyboard switching" allows you to cycle between running applications using a single keystroke. You specify the keystroke by clicking on the appropriate "Set" button, whereupon a small dialog will appear. Under system 7, you can define two switch keys: one will "hide" the current application as it switches; the other won't. Under system 6, unfortunately, this option isn't available and both keys do the same thing.
The "General preferences" button returns the dialog to its original state.
There are some applications which run in the background and which rarely, if ever, require attention. Print Monitor and DownLine spring to mind as examples. It's convenient to exclude such applications from the keyboard switching rota, the menu, or both, and clicking on the "Exclude" button allows you to do just that, bringing up the following dialog:
It's pretty self-explanatory, I think. Applications which are "excluded" are still reachable via the system menus (the apple menu under system 6 or earlier, and the process menu under system 7). If a background application is trying to attract your attention, it will usually put a diamond next to its name in the system menu: Apollo will notice this and override the exclusion, so you can always use Apollo to reach an application that needs you.
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: another is to use some sort of INIT loader, such as INIT Picker.
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 still have many improvements to Apollo in mind, including a dynamic "recently launched applications" group, icons in the menus 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.
When it's finished, Apollo will be shareware. For the moment, though, it's free for non-commercial distribution, subject to the usual caveats regarding commercial bulletin boards. Please keep Apollo and its documentation together.
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. I had a tremendous response to the previous versions of Apollo (0.5 & 0.6) — over a hundred people sent me email in the first month after release! My thanks to everyone who wrote to me: your praise, enthusiasm, bug reports and suggestions have been very helpful.
