One of the really nice things about some current Windows' applications is that you can change the text and layout used in the menus.

For example, in MS Outlook 2003, I have a menu item at the top of the menu that says 'All Read' - that's a renamed standard menu item 'Mark All as Read'.

Outlook doesn't allow me to assign a new Accelerator [hot key combination] for this very easily, but it's a nice and useful device I feel.

A very simple idea that uses zero use of dialog boxes - just right-click the menu item, select 'Change the Text', and away you go.

Two basic pictures shown of the same overlaid window on the right to save some space.  Note the popup menu.

Yet another menu idea I had was to change a menu's background. 

Although not the original aim, this little project sadly turned into a prettifier really.

When I developed this, we'd just got Owner Draw menu items, and rather than use the feature to draw smiley faces or non-standard check marks [grrrr], I thought I'd use it for shading/highlighting.

So, the idea was to automatically highlight suitable menu items for the user, based upon their mode, i.e., to highlight those items for the user that were probably appropriate at the time¹.

I never got that fully done, as I didn't want to [didn't have time to actually] build the state machine necessary to backend this.

Initially the code only shaded an entire menu, then it could do non-disjoint groups, and lastly, it could do a disjointed set of items.

Copyright © 2007 by peetm.

peet.morris -at- cslab.com