** PD/Shareware review / 302 words **

Menu6
85%
Shareware, Falcon only
Utility

** MENU_6.GIF here **

Menu6 is a Falcon Boot manager, programmed by Fabrice Giradot in France. It is designed to save you the tedious business of re-naming desk accessories, changing resolutions, and selecting Auto folder programs manually from the desktop.

Like other boot managers interrupting the start-up process displays a selection of menu boxes but unlike most boot managers you can use the mouse. Menu6 supports both normal and serial port PC style mice, and when you place the pointer over a menu or selection button, a "Bubble help style" message appears, giving a more detailed explanation. Clicking the right mouse button produces a pop-up menu which allows you display only the menus you wish to see, or create new ones, for example, to assign programs to function keys. The size, colour and even the title of the menu itself are all user configurable.
A separate "board" displays the system time and date and the menus can have scroll bars, be freely resized or picked up and dragged around the screen - all at a blistering speed GEM cannot match. The style of the program is very similar to XWindows on a Unix workstation. Menus can also be placed behind one another, then brought to the front using a window gadget.

This is an astounding piece of design, and although I've been using Stoop on my Falcon for ages I'm sorely tempted to switch to Menu6, which is still actively developed. The unregistered version cannot save any settings, so you'll need to send Fabrice 100 Francs (about œ10) to obtain the full version.

English and German versions are planned, naturally we'll review the English release when it's available.

** BC on **
Email: fabrice.girardot@hol.fr
URL: http://wwwperso.hol.fr/~girardot
** BC off **

** Italics on **
Colin Monro
** Italics off **