Update 4/1/06: I tried out ShelfMenu this evening, and I'm sorry to report it was a disappointment. The first thing I tried was to drag content to the menubar item, as I would a URL with URLWell, but no can do. The item doesn't take drag'n'drop items. It only takes things you copy to the clipboard. OK, well, maybe it can still be useful for writing short notes. The software can be configured to write each note as a .txt file to a location on your hard drive. Sounds good, so I tried this.

Only, once you write a note, there's no edit option. The only thing you can do is rename it (by default, ShelfMenu picks up the first 30 letters as the item's name). That's not very useful, I'm afraid. Similar disappointments came when pasting URL's into ShelfMenu. It'll store them, but you can't click on them to launch them... you have to copy and paste them to your browser address bar. Oops! Just not very useful for storing bookmarks.

ShelfMenu is good at accepting just about any kind of content... folders, applications, images, etc. But I couldn't figure out why I would do this when you have to copy and paste them again to put them somewhere else. Mac apps are famous for the drag'n'drop thing, and ShelfMenu really suffers from its absence.

Oh, one final thing: I couldn't stand the icon in the menubar, and there's no alternative. Hey! What do you expect for free? But seriously, ShelfMenu is a great idea which, if fleshed out a bit more, could prove to be a useful desktop widget.