My absolute favorite is MaxMenus from Proteron. It's an extremely useful utility that resembles such classic system enhancers for the traditional Mac operating system as Action Menus.

MaxMenus adds flexible menus that are always available in the corners of your screen. They offer easy access to commonly used applications, documents, folders, volumes, preferences, and more. Plus, you can customize MaxMenus to meet your needs.

MaxMenus also offers the ability to link any set of commands on your Mac via a keyboard combination. Just press the key combo while your mouse is over a menu item, and that's it. You can even assign key combinations to your menus from the MaxMenus preference pane.

The utility is designed to be a nice supplement to the Mac OS X Dock. It's exactly that. Heck, it even outdoes the Dock in many ways. For example, you can list more applications in a menu than in the Dock because there's more space. Also, MaxMenus are listed as text and, thus, are alphabetically sorted.

MaxMenus works unobtrusively. It simply places four colored tabs in the four corners of your Mac display. You click on a tab depending on what sort of items you wish to access. The software costs $29.95.

My second-favorite shareware utility for Mac OS X is Default Folder X from St. Clair Software, which also shares some of ...

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