Some things are better kept simple, other are best complex… however, there is nothing worse than an application that should be simple but is overly complex, or an application that should be complex but is overly simplistic. Snard is an interesting application that, although simple in scope, is complex in effect, walking on the boundary between the two and making it look clean and elegant.

What is it
Snard is a great many things, it is akin to the Apple menu of old, an application launcher, a quick network access mode, and then some. To keep things simple, we’ll start at the beginning: Snard is a collection of menus.

These menus can be heavily customized and activated/deactivated, and they can also function as both normal menu items and contextual menus.

The Menus
There are three menus that Snard adds to your menu bar, and these are: the Snard menu, the Preferences menu and the Locations menu.

The Preferences menu, as expected, contains all the preference panes located in System Preferences, and they can be grouped just like in the aforementioned window. While this menu can be useful to those who spend a great deal of time messing with the preferences, for most people it just does not justify the space it takes up.

The locations menu is a cross between the recently visited servers and the Favorites folder. It has a lot more potential uses, especially for people who network a lot and want a simple and fast way to initiate a connection. The favorites part is less glamorous, but since you can pretty much put whatever you want in here it is nevertheless functional.

The Snard menu is where most of the functionality of Snard can be found. It works similarly to the Apple menu of old, you can place whatever you want in it, however, unlike the former Apple menu, it can do a lot more than just files and folders. Everything you add to this menu is highly customizable and can be reordered by dragging; this, combined with the possibility to add labeled dividers and groups that act as virtual folders, give you a lot of power in setting up the contents of this menu the way you want them.

Niceties
Like I mentioned earlier, Snard can do a lot more than just files and folders, namely Worksets, URLs and Text clippings.

A workset is like a folder mixed with a launcher. You can add pretty much anything in it, from applications to folders and files, and when you select it, Snard will automatically open up everything inside. This makes it very easy to get ready to jump right into work and have everything you need already open and waiting.

URLs are an acronym for Universal Resource Location, also known as web links, but this name somehow implies that they are a link to a web site, when they can be just as well a link to a FTP server or anything else. Normally, this sort of thing is not exactly the most useful item to have in a menu, however, when combined with the worksets, they are great for doing Internet related work.

Text clippings are… text clippings. The idea behind these is that when you select them from the menu, Snard will automatically dump the content of the clipping to wherever the cursor currently is. This offers a nice automated way of imputing often used information without having to retype it every time.

Accesibility
I was pretty impressed with this application but this next set of features is what really makes it shine in my opinion.

Snard is easy to work with, no matter what approach you have. It can function as a normal menu that resides on the right side of the menu bar, but it can also function as a contextual menu that you can bring up anywhere using a predefined keyboard shortcut.

However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as each and every item in the Snard menu can have its own personal keyboard shortcut, and can be activated without ever having to go into the menu itself. Also, for those who like menus, each item can be given any icon you like, even the icon for the Snard menu can be changed.

The Good
This program leaves the me-too paradigm of other ‘Apple menu wannabe’ programs and actually takes steps towards adding great, useful features. It has the power to build a very complex menu system, but makes doing so simple.

The Bad
Although the program is about as straightforward and intuitive as you can get, this is no reason not to include proper documentation. Even inclusion of the information present on the site would be a big improvement.

The Truth
A great little application that can accommodate your needs and computing preferences. Give it a try.

Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge: