Mountain Lion's Notification Center has really screwed up the easy accessibility of XMenu and Spotlight. Now the Notification Center is the farthest right menubar icon, and Spotlight's now to the left of XMenu! Even after using a hack to get rid of the useless and annoying Notification Center, the Spotlight icon is still to the left of XMenu, which sucks because I use Spotlight ten times more frequently than XMenu but can no longer just sweep my index finger to the upper-right corner of the Track Pad to access it — now I have to apply care and precision to hit the Spotlight icon without accidentally clicking one of the XMenu icons instead.

Mr./Ms. Developer, could you please find some way to re-engineer Xmenu so its icons can be placed just to the left of the Spotlight icon for those of us who’ve nuked the Notification Center? Pretty please?

It's extremely simple to use but adds so much convenience. I like that it does what it does well.

I've used XMenu for many years, because it's provided exactly the interface I want to access apps and other stuff.

But 1.9.2 brings what is, for me, a huge disadvantage. It no longer places its menus close to the right edge of the menu bar, where they're always accessible. Instead, it places them to the left of all (?) other menu extras. This usually has them hidden behind application menu items on my little 1280x800 MacBook screen. That means I have to switch to Finder or some other menu-light app before I can get access. For Snippets, it's deadly, as I can no longer easily paste them where I want because of having to switch out of the target application.

Try as I might, I can't get them to move to the right. I sorted XMenu to first position in my Login Items pref and logged out/in, no joy. The DEVONtechnologies XMenu forum has a similar issue posted April 1 by theorg, asking for advice/fix, with no response after a week.

I'll be trying to find 1.9.1 and reinstall.

Advice: if you have a small screen, stick with 1.9.1.

DOWNLOAD NOTE: Direct download link for XMenu 1.9.2: http://www.devon-technologies.com/files/XMenu.app.zip because as of 7:00 AM on March 20, the version downloading from this MacUpdate link is still 1.9.1.

XMenu is a GREAT free app that gives you super-fast, easy access to your files and apps, and I'm thrilled that DEVONtechnologies continues to develop it. I've been using it for years, but previous versions became too slow — I had to retire the Applications menu and replace it with Himmelbar because it started taking too long to open under OS 10.6.3+. Thankfully, version 1.9.2 was rewritten as 32/64-bit, so now it’s snappier by perhaps 15-20%. So, I re-rate it at 4.5 stars. The only things that could make it better would be a color preference for the menus, and even speedier operation of the Applications menu. But asking that of such a generous developer would be greedy!

I've been using XMenu for a few years and think it's a really great old app. However, as mentioned in my 7/15/10 review below, its v. 1.9.0 Applications menu had simply become t o o d a r n s l o w to render after clicking its icon. So, now I use Himmelbar as an Applications launcher and XMenu's Home and Snippets menus for those functions because they work better than any of the other 12 or so such apps available.

However, I just discovered that XMenu was updated to v. 1.9.1 in November 2010 after nearly 2 years of neglect, so I was hopeful that Devontechnologies had modernized it. But after trying it today, I was very disappointed to discover that it hadn't become even the slightest bit quicker, and in fact hadn’t improved one jot. The update’s description said that they’d added an alternate menu accessible by control-clicking one of its icons, but v. 1.9.0 already had that functionality, and I’ve been using it for more than 2 years! So I don’t know what the heck they were thinking when they made that statement.

So unfortunately, XMenu is STILL dying, and will continue to die until its developer rewrites it from the ground up to take advantage of several Leopard and Snow Leopard technologies that its current version simply ignores, making it one ulcerously slow waste of time. Shame, really.

For me as well, this bug described (from "Anonymous") on July 7th 2005 remains: the XMenu icon still appears in the extreme right corner, behind the spotlight icon(!) on start-up if the option "display on left from menu extras" is unset.

And I use custom icons, most of which are not displayed as such (Some are, other appear as generic).

Awesome program otherwise, perfect for OS 9 refugees or those willing to keep the dock as free as possible.
A nice tool I would not want to miss.