Has anyone tried the Menu change Plug-ins?

[garhop]

Posted this on the FMP board and no response.

There appears to be two menu altering plug-ins on the market. (1) Menu Control 1.5 by Dacons and (2) the new version of SecureFM 6 by New Millennium. Has anyone tried either?..both?... and your opinion please.

Gary

[CobaltSky]

Yep, there are two on the market - from Dacons and New Millennium respectively. And, as you've indicated, the Dacons offering is now up to version 1.5 (in which form it is available as x-plat - version 1.1 was win-only).

More moves are afoot, however, as New Millennium have foreshadowed inclusion of 'magic menu' features in a future release of SecureFM, which (apparently) will give it extended functionality in the direction of being able to selectively add scripts to FileMaker menus.

I have an x-plat developer license to MenuControl 1.5. I've worked with 1.1 under Win - and although not as flexible as I'd like, nor very easy to set up, it was nevertheless a good product. Version 1.5 promises to be more flexible and all-round a more refined product, however its release is so recent that I've not done enough with it to be able to give you a balanced 'review'.

In its current release, SecureFM is focussed primarily on selectively diabling menus and/or menu items. It doesn't enable the building of new user-defined menus (though as notes earlier, all that may change with a forthcoming release). I'm afraid that I can't give you a detailed appraisal of the current version of SecureFM because although I've conducted tests with it in demo mode, I've not used it for development.

MenuControl works on different principles and does not selectively disable menus. Instead, it removes them all, and then allows you to build your own set from scratch using scripts. While this can be laborious, it gives you a lot of control over the final application interface.

Two additional features of MenuControl which warrant a mention are the ability to create multiple menu sets and swap them mid-flight (eg different menus for different layouts within a solution etc...) and the ability to define custom modifier key combinations (using the whole alphanumeric character set) to trigger your custom menu commands from the keyboard.

On the other hand one limitation with MenuControl is that it does not work in 'Find' mode, so scripted finds based on global fields are required as a work-around. If you build your solution with this in mind, this limitation may not be too troublesome, but it makes the idea of a MenuControl 'retro-fit' potentially more challenging.

[Joern]

The new version allows you to have custom menus in 'Find Mode'. Other limitations from earlier versions have been eliminated.

To read what users say about MenuControl check out:

http://www.dacons.net/fmplugins/menucontrol/userquotes/index.html

As with all plug-ins you can download a fully working trial version and see if it fits you needs.