14 DAY TRIAL // No matter how well a program is designed, it will always suffer from one fatal flaw: it is intended to be used by many people, and as such, it will only be perfect for few of them. The more people a piece of software is targeted to, the less will find it perfect, and when you have something that is intended for everyone, then nobody will find it perfect. This is especially true when we have to deal with operating systems, and as good as OS X may be, it is not perfect for many people. That is why Widgets are so popular: they are very small and specialized and they are perfect for that small, specialized use. Of course, Widgets are limited, and this is one of the reasons that there are so many Utility applications out there that serve all sorts of purposes and which can be configured by the users to fit their exact needs.
ClawMenu is one such small application, which - once you started poking around it - is much bigger than you might have initially expected.
What it does
ClawMenu is an set of menus that integrate with the Mac OS X menubar, providing customizable menus that let you access your folders, address book, iTunes library, Safari bookmarks, RSS feeds, the recent items on your clipboard, System Preferences, screen capture and a great deal of other things, way too many to list them all.
It is not an entirely new application and there are others like it, but it has its own take on things that does set it apart from the competition.
Working with it
ClawMenu is a set of menus, and when you start up the application, the default menus will appear in the menubar. Now, these can be modified to suit your needs, but it does not stop there. That set of menus can also be pulled out of the menubar and docked to any edge of the screen; additionally, any one of those menus can be detached, either as a floating window or a dockable menu that shows and hides when you mouse over and click it. The floating windows can even be set to act as normal windows, at the desktop level or on top of all other windows. You can also set shortcuts for different kinds of information, which will open up their menus. Overall, you have a lot of options when it comes to where you want the information to be displayed.
In terms of what information can be displayed, the choices are also quite spectacular. These range from RRS feeds to recent documents, iTunes playlists and address book contacts, and they can all be shown in any one of the locations mentioned above. The menus are interactive and you can browse a volume from them, read RSS feed and control iTunes, all this from the same ClawMenu interface.
What was left behind
While ClawMenu is incredibly functional for such a small piece of software, there are certain things about it that are simply dysfunctional.
A good example of this is the search bar at the top of every menu? it is absolutely useless. I keep most of my application in a separate location from the applications folder on the system volume. This was not an issue because it let me add the location in the preferences; however, since those applications I added were all in subfolders, they were not immediately accessible from the menu. I tried the search function, which returned no results, because it only looks for items in the current menu. What is the point? In any OS X menu, you can start typing the name of the entry to automatically jump to it? even in ClawMenu. What is the point of having to actually mouse over to the search box, click to focus there and then type in the name of something that is in that menu, when you can just start typing to accomplish the same thing. The search is totally pointless, it should search within the contents of all the folders and locate the item I am looking for. This is especially bad in the RSS feed menu, where the search function only searches in the name of the feeds when you are on the top level; once you enter a specific feed, however, the search does nothing: it won't search inside the title of the news item, nor in the body of it, which is even more absurd considering that you can simply start typing and the OS X menu management will kick in and take you to the item you want.
Another thing that left me speechless was the documentation, which is written entirely in French. While this program is not exactly overly complicated, it is not simplistic by any means, and there are many things that are not immediately obvious. The detached windows alone caused me headaches because they seemed to keep appearing and I could not get rid of them all, some of them letting me delete them, while others only letting me close them. In the end, I figured out that it was the show all the time option that was causing the problem and would not let me close the window, but the documentation although there, was totally useless.
The Good
Quite complex and flexible in what it can do. Can be configured to serve in many different ways.
The Bad
Bad implementation of the search function and a total lack of documentation. While the documentation may be there, an English localized application should have English documentation, not French.
The Truth
This application is a brilliant example of how you can get huge amounts of functionality from very small applications.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
