MenuBar

There’s a whole variety of methods through which you can set up your computer to quickly launch programs of interest. Most comfort, however, comes from third-party tools, which are constantly looking for new ways of satisfying flexibility needs. For instance, MenuBar is a lightweight tool to launch websites and programs.

The setup process takes you through a few easy steps, but the application is portable, and you can just as well deploy it on a thumb drive to be your portable app launcher. However, the computer you use it on must have .NET Framework installed to ensure functionality, but modern Windows iterations come with it in the default set of features.

A simple drop-down menu shows up at the top of the desktop as soon as the program is launched. In fact, this is the way you get to easily launch items of interest, with up to three configurable drop-down menus. These also come with sets of predefined online and offline examples to serve as examples.

Accessing the set of preferences lets you set up a few visual elements. There’s the possibility to change background and text color to make it suit your style. You can adjust position on screen, as well as opacity level by dragging a couple of sliders around.

The link editor is where you get to configure all access options. You can toggle the visibility of the three drop-down menus from here. While a menu is selected, you get the chance to provide either a web URL, program executable, or even misc file to be opened in the default editor or viewer. The only inconvenience is that it always stays on top of all windows, with no option to toggle this state.

All things considered, we can state that MenuBar is the type of application you can use to keep the desktop a clean space, but also be able to launch just about anything at the press of a button. Even though it always sits on top of everything else, it can be thoroughly configured to hold both online and offline items.