MENU EDITOR USAGE
Once you have BROWSED to the folder that contains a bunch of subfolders that you want to make a menu for, then you will see the left side folder TreeView fill up with a list of sub-folders to be displayed. It appears in the same structure as the Windows Explorer (file manager). You get to see the "+" symbol to indicate that you can open up a branch of the tree etc...
Just click on a folder and then you will see the list of filenames in the control just beneath the TreeView control. To create a Menu entry, you need to fill out the Menu Item fields and then click "Create New Menu Item"
The Menu Item fields to fill in are as follows:
TITLE:
This is the menu caption that you want to appear in the menu that is presented to the user.
FILE:
This is the filename that you want to perform some kind of action on. To prevent you from making TYPOS, we don't allow you to type directly into this field. Instead, you click on a filename in the files list and then you click the "SET" button. If the folder of interest contains several files that you may want to deal with, then leave this field BLANK. You can BLANK the field with the "SET" button too. This way, the Action Button will not run anything specific, it will just open up an explorer window showing the folder's contents.
NOTE: There is a special consideration for folders with NO FILES. You may have a main folder that contains some subfolders. The parent folder is used for organizational purposes. So, if you had 4 Video Editor programs, you could create a folder called "Video Editors" in the "Files_To_Burn" folder. Then, you could have 4 subfolders inside of the "Video Editors" folder. They might be called "ULead Editor", "Pinnacle Studio", "Power Director" and "K-World Editor". THEN, in each of these subfolders, you would place the install program for each of the editors. The parent folder "Video Editors" would of course NOT contain any files. It just has folders. So, your "FILE:" field would thus be blank. That is the only case in which you would want the "FILE:" field blank. Well, I lie, there is ONE more case where it's useful to have NO specific filename set. Let's say you have a folder of 10 files and none of them are to be run. It may be a collection of word documents and you didn't want to open up a specific one with the action button. You could leave the "FILE:" field blank and then the "ACTION:" button will just open up the folder when the user clicks on it from the main menu.
HINT: A useful thing to do, if you have a folder with several files in it, might be to ADD a new file called "README.TXT" to the folder. THEN select that file as the "FILE:" field. Then when the user runs the menu program, he can click on the Action button and he will see what you have entered in the" README.TXT" file.
ACTION:
The text that you place in here is not important to the way the program works. You can put whatever text you want in there. Just remember that whatever you enter will be displayed to the user when he views the menu. The caption of the action button will contain the text you typed in here. There is a pulldown next to this field that contains a list of commonly used phrases for you to select from. You can just select a phrase and it will be typed in for you.
DESCRIPTION:
The text you enter here is shown to the user as they navigate the menu system. So, please make it descriptive as possible so the user knows what actions will be taken when they choose a particular Menu Item. A good suggestion would be to enter any registration codes and your likes and dislikes of the program so that many months later you can still run it and know what to expect. In otherwords, make it descriptive.
CREATE NEW MENU ITEM:
CREATE GROUP MENU:
UPDATE MENU ITEM:
This allows you to save the menu item file !menu.ini to the specified folder. These saved menu item files are the basis of how Menu Master works. If you decide later that you don't want the !menu.ini files on your system, you can of course use the "DELETE" button.
DELETE:
This deletes the menu item file called !menu.ini from the specified folder. It then rebuilds the "Menu Emulator" so that you don't see that menu item anymore.
DELETE SUB-MENUbITEMS:
If you decided that you didn't want the menus anymore for a particular folder and it's sub-folders, then you could use this button. So, if you had 75 menu items it would take 75 clicks of the "Delete" button to accomplish this task. The "Delete Sub-Menu Items" button makes life easier for you. It will delete the currently selected menu item, PLUS it will delete all of the menu items located in ANY sub-folder that is a child of the currently selected folder.
NOTE: It does NOT delete folder or regular files, it ONLY deletes the special Menu Item files named !menu.ini that are saved in the various folders that you have saved Menu Items in.
GROUPING CONSIDERATIONS:
How can I create menu GROUPS.? I want to have a menu that has child menu items so that the menu shows a "+" to indicate that there are menu items inside that particular menu entry.
If all your menu items have a filename in the "FILE:" property, then your menu will show all the entries with NONE of them with a "+". In order to group several of the Menu Items into a single group, you could create a new folder called "Video Tools" and then move the several folders of video tools into the "Video Tools" folder. The second step is to click on the "Video Tools" folder in the Folder tree, and then click on the "Create Group Menu Item" button. This will create the grouping and you will see the "+": in the Menu Emulator and when you click on the "+" to open up the menu, you will see your sub menu items.
SORTING CONSIDERATIONS:
How can I control the ORDER in which the Menu Items appear on my Menu?
The Menu Items are sorted by the Menu Item's "TITLE:" property. So, theoretically, you could start each title with 1) then 2) then 3) etc... That way you can control the sort order.
OTHER BUTTONS AND MENUS
BURN TO CD/DVD:
This allows you to burn a CD/DVD that will contain all the folders that you have loaded and are viewing in the menu emulator. It will optionally place the MENU.EXE and AUTORUN.INF files onto the CD/DVD for you as well. NOTE: Read the notes below in the "Browse Folder" section about what folder gets burned.
BROWSE FOLDER:
This allows you to locate a folder that is the root level for a menu system you are working on.
NOTE: Although you COULD specify "C:\" instead of "C:\Downloads" or "C:\Files_To_Burn", the reason you would NOT want to specify "C:\" is because, it will take longer to load because the whole hard drive will have to be searched, instead of the more specific folder. PLUS, when you go to BURN the CD, it will take the folder that you last browsed to. So, if it was "C:\", then it would try to burn the contents of "C:\" onto a CD. There is NO WAY you could fit all the files from your "C:\" drive onto a CD. Or at least 99.99% of the systems out there ;) So, if you are just in editing mode and maybe want to work on several main menus at the same time, then go ahead and specify "C:\", but remember when it comes time to burn that you should have a more specific folder loaded at that point in time.
MENU EMULATOR:
This works basically like the main menu on the main screen of this program. You choose a menu item and then you can see the description and you have 2 buttons to click.
The action button can say pretty much anything and it typically opens a specific file. The "Open The Folder" button doesn't run anything specific, but instead just opens the contents of the folder for you to look at.
CREATE SAMPLE PROJECT:
In case you don't have a folder all setup to play with, you can create a sample project folder. This folder will be stored in your Window's TEMP folder. That way, eventually it will be removed. The project folder will contain several subfolders and various programs and such. It will also contain several Menu Items. From this sample project folder, you should be able to see a lot of how this program works.
LOCATE / SELECT PREVIOUSLY CREATED MENUS:
This is VERY handy indeed. Let's pretend you had lots of menu systems created on your system. Let's say you created one on drive C:\ and one on H:\ and one on a network drive called \\Server\Utilities ... Well, you could use the LOCATE feature and select those drives and network paths and POOF, they ALL get loaded at once so you can see ALL the menu systems of interest. At this point you could delete the menu items, or edit them or create more. The ability to see ALL of your menu items in one concise list is very friendly.
SEARCH LOADED MENU ITEMS FOR WORD(S):
Not only is the menu system easy to use, but you can SEARCH the menu items for some text. Just type in the text and POOF, it searches all of the currently displaying menu items for any matches. It will then show you which menu items match the search query. All fields in the menu item are searched (Title, File, Description ).