SyMenu

Portable apps don't show up in the usual places you look for programs, such as the Start Menu, and they tend to get scattered throughout your system. SyMenu's primary mission is to make it easy for you to keep track of and open your portable applications, though it also works with installed programs as well as documents, URLs, folders, and Windows commands. With drag-and-drop functionality and absolute path support, SyMenu collects your linked items in a simple menu structure and opens them instantly when you click them.

SyMenu's system tray icon serves as the central access point; clicking it opens a menu view accessing the program's search bar, recent items, and options, which actually opens the main view. Following the setup guide for first-time users, we started by adding programs and other linked items to SyMenu, which couldn't be easier. As we added each item, its name, path, and other data appeared in SyMenu's Item Manager, which included various Autoexec, Extension Manager, and Additional Parameters options as well as the option to change icons.

Clicking the Configuration menu let us open the program's tabbed Options dialog, which includes Startup and Closing options, themes and colors, hot-key settings, and languages. SyMenu has many features and options we didn't delve deeply into, such as the ability to temporarily replace normal Windows file extension associations with custom SyMenu associations, which enables the program to search through your system's entire Start Menu instead of just linked items.

We added a variety of desktop icons for portable and installed apps to SyMenu, including CCleaner, Malwarebytes, and Google Chrome and Google Earth, plus some Web-based locations. Opening SyMenu and clicking any one of the linked items opened it instantly, even more quickly than the desktop shortcut, in some cases, or so it seemed. This flexible, versatile, highly customizable program menu and launcher has something for all users.