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For anyone that is running a dual monitor setup with OS X, you’ve most likley questioned Apple’s reasons for not providing a little more flexibility with the Menu Bar. Thankfully, there are others out there that have questioned why menu items are not more easily accessible from a secondary monitor when the menu is located on the primary.

At current there are two solutions (that I am aware of) for circumventing the problem of menu items being located a few mouse swipes across the table (3500+ pixels can be a long way to travel). Check out either of the following which provide additional methods for accessing crucial Menu Bar items no matter which display is set to be the primary.

• StepMenus – Provides a NeXT Step style main menu for Cocoa Mac OS X applications. Menu Bar items for the currently active application will be displayed in a simple floating box menu.
• DejaMenu – Will display the current application’s main menu as a contextual menu when a key combination is pressed.

StepMenus does not look as though it has been updated in quite some time but DejaMenus recently received its 1.2.1 update in August 2006. StepMenus is a PPC release while DejaMenus is provided as a Universal Binary.

If there are any other applications / utilities worth checking out, drop your recommendations in the comments.