The new version of FolderGlance was released yesterday, making it compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. One comment I have received from a number of users can be summarized as follows:

Why can't you make the FolderGlance items appear in the main context menu? I hate having to dig down into the "More..." submenu!

The answer to this question relates to some of the hurdles I encountered in making FolderGlance run on Leopard, but the main reason is actually the change in how contextual menu plugins are loaded on Leopard.

In 10.4 and earlier, a contextual menu plugin would be loaded just before the main context menu appeared. It would be asked to examine the current context, and add any items to the contextual menu. With the introduction of the More... submenu, this has changed. Leopard (or possibly, the Finder) no longer loads plugins at once -- instead, they only load once the More... menu is shown, or when you start navigating the contextual menu using the keyboard.

Clearly, one way to solve this issue is to use the existing Carbon event handler technique to discover when the main context menu is opened, and then populate it with FolderGlance's items. Unfortunately, this doesn't work. It is .. a challenge to differentiate between opening the context menu, and opening any other menu (for instance from the menu bar), and even if it was possible to discover when the context menu was opened, you still don't know what the current selection in the Finder is. This information isn't given to the plugin before the More... submenu is opened.

This leaves FolderGlance where it is right now - all items appear in the More submenu (which is itself a challenge -- in particular, care must be taken to avoid populating the Open with... menu). Maybe I'll think of a solution to this in the future, but for now the current behaviour will have to suffice.