Is Piquant the Utility to End All Utilities?

PiquantMenu¹. I don’t know how to say it, and I’m not sure I can even explain what it does, but heck it’s useful! The best description I can come up with is it’s the Swiss Army Knife of utilities for OS X.

What would you get if you took a bit of Onyx, a dash of Quicksilver, a snippet of Butler, a pinch of Grab, a nip of NetNewsWire and a few other bits and pieces, and then rolled them all into one? You’d get PiquantMenu. It’s not all of any of these, but has enough from each to be very useful.

PiquantMenu is an iconbar that floats above your menubar, providing access to a plethora of information and functions. Check this list:
- File and folder access and navigation including context tools
- iTunes controller
- System preferences
- Clipboard viewer
- Screen capture
- RSS Newsreader
- Notifications (similar to Growl)
- Safari bookmarks
- Address book
- Fast User Switching
- Access to invisible files
- Active applications
- Password generator
- Recent items (as selected through PiquantMenu)
- Most popular items (as selected through PiquantMenu)

Onyx like access to hidden settings:
- Dock extra settings
- Toggle Finder show/hide invisible files
- Toggle safari debug menu
- Exposé extra settings
- Toggle crash report alert
- Toggle Keychain in menubar

Menus can be accessed in three ways:

1) From the PiquantMenu main menu
2) From the extra menus
3) From detached menus which can either float or be attached to one of the sides of your screen

Here’s some of PiquantMenu’s menus:

Customization
PiquantMenu is highly customizable. You can personalize the look of it to match your tastes. The colors, transparency, fonts and corner radius can all be changed. You also can assign images as background but I couldn’t get that to work.

Items also have a plethora of options to play around with, such as in this example of Address Book’s settings:

And you can add Folder, Applications and Smart Folders to the main menu.

Particularly useful is that the Screen Capture is configurable. You can set the file format, file name and the location to save captures. Plus when you do capture, you can choose either capture to file or clipboard.

Shortcomings
Besides the background image customization not working, I didn’t find much wrong with PiquantMenu. A couple of things to mention though are:
- The detached menus can only float on your primary screen if you have dual screens.
- Menus don’t remember their last state. So for example, if you navigate to a folder and then do something else, when you return to PiquantMenu, it will be back to the main menu.

It’s funny how an app like this makes you greedy. Despite all it gives, i want more! I’d like:
- Access to spotlight
- List of Automator workflows
- iChat “who’s online”
- A way to combine all the menubar items into one menu in PiquantMenu

Overall
PiquantMenu is incredibly useful. It puts so many things that you regularly use right at your fingertips, and all in one easy to access place, as well as adding a few hidden OS X tricks. It’s well worth the asking price of US$18. I highly recommend it and give it a 9/10.

1 Piquant Menu has been renamed ClawMenu from 27 July 2006