This program allows you to create an easy to use MENU system for CDs that you may burn. A lot of people like to download all kinds of shareware and patches and updates and PDF documents etc... Then they pile it all onto a CD. That's fine and dandy, BUT, if you go back a year later, you may have NO IDEA what all the stuff does. Even if you don't wind up burning them onto a CD or DVD and just keep all your downloaded and aquired stuff on your hard drive, it can still be a chore to remember what in the world all that stuff is supposed to do. Do you remember that last time you were doing house keeping on your drive and saw a file and thought "What's this supposed to do?". Using this program will allow that to never happen again.

The idea is to create a menu system much like what you see when you use the "Start" then "All Programs" button in Windows. See, you have thousands of files in your program files folder and the Windows menu system allows you to quickly pick what program you want to run. Much the same, Folder Menu Master will do the same thing for your miscellaneous files. The difference is that the Windows menu system only contains menu entries that come from programs that you INSTALLED. Our Folder Menu Master program does NOT require that you install anything. You can have a collection of utilities and movies and patches and XLS files and DOC files and build a menu system to keep those goodies you've collected in an organized way.

By using Folder Menu Master, you can create a menu system to keep track of your goodies so that you don't forget what they do and don't forget how to install them etc... Plus if you wanted to give your goodies to a buddy on a CD or DVD, your buddy would be able to make use of them easily. This program eliminates all the problems found in the above half-baked solutions (#1,#2,#3). It provides easy maintenance, easy menu to select the program you want to inquire about and an easy way to install or run or open or play to file in question.

The first thing to do is to organize your folders like we showed in step #1. Just have it structured and grouped like an outline to a book. Now, RUN the Folder Menu Master <menu.exe> program and choose the "C:\Downloads" folder as your main menu location. You are presented with a nice tree view layout of your folders. Just click on each folder <MultiMedia, Audio_Tools, FreeAudioEditor, Pepsky, CPU_Tester, etc...> and save a Menu Item for it. So, if you had 19 folders, you could end up with 19 menu entries. These menu items are just like the !!!Readme.txt file that was talked about in step #3. Instead of saving a !!!Readme.txt file, we save a file called !menu.ini in each folder that you choose to save a menu item. These files contain exactly what you would have put into the !!!Readme.txt file. It contains a description of the program and maybe whatever registration codes are needed and whether or not the program has expired or if you like it a lot etc... The !menu.ini file also contains a text string that will contain the text of the MENU TITLE that the user will see when they run the Menu Master program. So, after you have created the 19 menu items, the Menu Master program will show a nice menu that would list all the programs available in the C:\Downloads folder. And they will be grouped in a tree fashion that's similar to the windows explorer file manager where you have a plus sign "+" to indicate that you can open up a branch of the tree. So, as you scroll up and down the menu, you will see the cooresponding program description at the same time in another window. Very nice and easy to use.

Now when you run MENU.EXE, and point to the "C:\Downloads" folder in the program, then you will see your menu system. It's MUCH more robust that the Windows Program Files menu. As you click on each Menu Item, you are shown a complete description of the Menu Item. Also, there are TWO buttons displayed under the description window. You have an Action button and a "Show Folder Contents" button. The later button is self explanatory. The ACTION button will do the desired action that you indicated in the menu editor. The action can either execute and RUN a specified program. It can play a movie, view a web site, view a PDF, etc... Basically it technically performs an "OPEN" on the specified file. It acts just as though you double-clicked on it in Windows Explorer<file manager>. So, by having a complete description displayed to the user for each Menu Item, it makes it very handy to keep track of a lot of utilities that you may not use very often.

A lot of programs allow you to create PROJECTS. And these projects could be for programming, or video editing, or audio editing, or burning CDs etc.. And a typical PROJECT file will contain a LIST of filenames that are associated with the project. These filenames are stored in the project file with their FULL PATH. So, for example:

As you can see, the full path is stored along with the filename. This is so that the Video Editor can locate all of your movie files associated with the project you just loaded and then display them onto your screen in some friendly fashion. So, although this is all stored into one single project file, it has the ANNOYANCE of the fact that if you MOVE your movies around on your hard drive, then you are setting yourself up for disappointment when you go back to open the project. ;) It won't be able to locate those movies that you moved or renamed. Most good software will allow you to BROWSE to re-located <resolve> the filename. Okay, now that you understand how most applications keep track of multiple filenames or multiple folder names, we will discuss how FOLDER MENU MASTER IS TOTALLY DIFFERENT AND BETTER. That's because we use the method talked about in step #3, where we keep a file in EACH folder to describe the contents of that folder.

Folder Menu Master, does NOT keep track of all the files of interest all specified into ONE project file. INSTEAD, it creates ONE Menu Item in each folder that you want a menu item. The Menu Item filename is called !MENU.INI. So, you could have quite a few of these files sprinkled into your "C:\Downloads" folder. The contents of the !Menu.Ini file is similar to the following.

As you can see, although you see a filename, you do NOT see a PATH. That is because the path is not needed. Because the menu system will KNOW where the filename is located, because it's located in the same folder as the !Menu.Ini file ;) Get it? There is no need to store any path information inside of these Menu Item files. So, if this menu item was located in a folder called Goodies\Patches\Office and you later decided to rename the folder from "Office" to "Office2003" you would NOT experience any problem. In fact you can move and rename your folders any which way you want and it will NOT affect our menu system at all. No missing links or any of those annoyances associated with moving and renaming things. MUCH less hassle. And the fact that these !Menu.Ini files are super small, having many of them sprinkled around instead of a single project file is of no real consequence. Pus if you later decide that you don't want to use the Folder Menu Master system and want to remove those Menu Item files, then just do a search for !Menu.Ini on your system and then DELETE them. You could do that in about 30 seconds.

The ideal thing to do is to burn MENU.EXE onto the root of the CD/DVD that you create. That way the user of the CD can navigate through all the stuff on the CD more easily. An extra added nice touch would be to make it so that the CD will "auto-play". This way, MENU.EXE will auto run when the CD is inserted. The way you accomplish this is to place a file called AUTORUN.INF onto the root of the CD. The contents of the AUTORUN.INF file should be as follows.

So, the ROOT of the CD would contain Menu.exe and Autorun.inf and then all of your sub folders. Have fun!!!!

When the MENU.EXE program runs from a CD/DVD or memory card or USB drive, it will scan all the folders of the drive and bring up the menu of menu items for you.

As an extra added bonus, the program can BURN your files to a CD or DVD and automatically place the menu.exe and autorun.inf files onto it for you. You need to have XP operating system or later. All you do is tell the burning wizard that you want to burn C:\Downloads and then it does the rest.

Although I wrote this to make life easier for ME when I dump a bunch of stuff onto a CD, I thought all of a sudden that this program isn't only useful to create a Menu for a CD or DVD, but in fact it's useful to keep a menu system on your hard drive as well. I have plenty of stuff that I have not dumped off onto a CD and is just sitting on the hard drive. So, I can use the program to organize it all and make life easier for me later on.