Many veteran Mac users -- those who spent years on the “classic” Mac operating system of OS 9 and earlier – lamented the omission in Mac OS X of one prominent, handy feature: the Apple Menu. While a form of the Apple Menu remains in OS X, it mostly contains basic system functions and is not user customizable.

As a replacement, Mac users got the Dock. The problem with the Dock, however, is that its strength is also its weakness: it holds icons for frequently used programs (that may or may not be running), currently running programs, minimized windows of currently running apps, documents, and the Trash Can. As with the old Apple Menu, the user can add, delete or move these icons (except for the Trash Can). Anything you put in the Dock is easily accessible. But the more you put in the Dock, the more crowded it becomes and the harder it gets to find what you’re looking for.

I always thought that Apple should have kept a customizable Apple Menu as an option for power users who want quick access to a lot of apps, folders, file servers and documents without loading up the Dock to the point of impracticality. Such users need a customizable Apple Menu to keep items they may not use every day but still want readily available. The “Recent Items” submenu in the OS X Apple Menu tries to fulfill this need but its contents and the order in which the items appear change according to what you’ve used most recently. Useful, but it’s still not a menu I can control.

Luckily, third parties have long since solved this problem. Today’s Monday morning Macware features two variations: one I have used for years, FruitMenu, and another I discovered just recently, XMenu.

FruitMenu (Unsanity, $10 shareware) is by far the more powerful of the two. FruitMenu not only returns full OS 9 functionality, it improves upon the original by making just about everything customizable. Not only can you add and group items together as you see fit, you can even assign hotkeys to individual items for even faster access. You can put anything in FruitMenu: apps, folders, documents, even disks. You can even add your Mac’s IP address (geekspeak for network address) to the Apple menu.

That restores the old Apple menu functions, but FruitMenu takes menu customization much further. You can create customized Apple menus for individual applications. If you’re a fan of contextual menus – those mini-menus that pop up when you right click or hold down the control key as you click the mouse – you can customize those, too. Any apps that don’t have customized settings simply use the global settings.

FruitMenu has only one drawback, but it’s a significant one that precludes me from recommending it unequivocally. To work its magic, FruitMenu employs a “system hack.” That means it loads a piece of software into your system called the “application enhancer” which adds some code to the programs you launch and run on your Mac. Unsanity has expended a great deal of effort to ensure that the application enhancer works invisibly and does no harm. I can personally vouch for it, having run it for several years on multiple Macs without incident. Nevertheless it’s possible that some less experienced users could feel uncomfortable running a system hack on their beloved Mac.

That brings us to the second option, XMenu (DEVONtechnologies, freeware), which the squeamish will be relieved to learn requires no system hacks whatsoever. XMenu functions as a background application (it doesn’t show up in the Dock while it’s running) and simply adds new menus to the Mac’s menu bar. Because it’s an app, you have to launch XMenu each time you boot up your Mac -- unless you add it to your Login Items (accessed through the Accounts System Preferences panel) so it will launch automatically when you start up the computer.

XMenu, though far less sophisticated than FruitMenu, does achieve the goal of restoring an old-style Apple menu – with a twist. Instead of altering the OS X Apple menu, XMenu adds new ones on the far right side of the Menu bar. You can add up to five: Applications, Developer, Home, Documents and User-Defined. Each has its own icon. Only the User-Defined menu is customizable, though; the others draw their content from the system folders of the same name. Thus, the Documents menu lists everything in your Documents folder. Any changes you make to those folders are picked up automatically in the respective menus. The User-Defined Menu draws its content from a folder inside the Library folder of the user’s directory. This is more like the OS 9 customizable Apple menu, in which you can keep any apps, folders or documents.

Depending upon how you work, XMenu could serve your needs better than FruitMenu. It costs nothing and won’t monkey with any code. Not everyone wants or needs the level of customization that FruitMenu offers, although power users generally like maximum control. It’s a matter of taste.

Both XMenu and FruitMenu are excellent options for any Mac user yearning for the functionality, flexibility and convenience of the classic Mac OS Apple menu. You can try both risk-free (FruitMenu offers a 15-day free trial).