Application Switcher Menu: Classic Application Switching

Do you remember the days of a spatial Finder? Did you bemoan the loss of Clarus the dogcow? Cry when Apple removed all traces of pinstripes in Leopard? Well then, allow me to introduce you to Application Switcher Menu (henceforth referred to as ASM) from developer Frank Vercruesse.

ASM includes more tools than you might assume from the vanilla name, but the main draw of the application is that it brings the functionality of the classic Mac OS application switcher to OS X. “Classic” Mac OS users might remember switching between applications through a menu bar icon. ASM brings that back.

With some fiddling in the expansive preference pane, you can even make ASM look exactly like its classic doppelgänger: complete with a separator and a superfluous text label.

Why use something that emulates a tool from the 20th century? Well, besides nostalgia, AMS includes some nice extras such as classic window and single application mode. Classic Window Mode orders all windows of an application to front when it becomes active, while Single Application Mode automatically hides applications other than the front-most one. These two additional functions are small, but work together in such as way that ASM actually makes sense as a Dock replacement.

Application Switcher Menu requires 10.3 or later, works great on Leopard, and costs $15 for a single user license (family and site licenses are also available).