Whats the big deal with the Apple menu?
Back in the day—circa 2001 and earlier—there was a simple rainbow-coloured menu in the upper left corner of your Mac screen, and just by moving some files around you could fill it with whatever you wanted: frequently used applications, folders, files, even an alias to the entire contents of your hard disk. Once you’d done that, one click on the apple brought out a lovely hierarchical menu (shown in the first screenshot), and with a few mouse moves and another click, you could easily launch what you needed at that moment. It was simple and elegant, and what it contained was pretty much totally up to you. It took advantage of Fitts’s Law by being near the corner of the screen—though including the actual corner of the screen as part of the menu target would have been even better. But Apple, especially since the return of big boss Steve Jobs in 1996, has long had a “we know better than you” complex in some areas, and the Mac OS X Apple menu shows it. When Mac OS X was in beta testing, ther
