Power On Software, the spiritual heirs to Now Utilities, were flexing their corporate muscle at MacWorld Expo. Power On was demonstrating their suite of "Action" Utilities, many which emulate the late Now Utilities functionality. Although some people disdain the unusual one, Action GoMac, as reminding them too much of a Windows taskbar, Action GoMac remains a gamer's great friend. Not only is it a savvy launch utility, but it also provides clean application switching in an intuitive manner on a great number of titles that often foil menubar application switching. Building on their success in bringing back the Now functionality to the Mac User in an 8.x environment, Action Menus brings back the best of Now Menus, a much superior system to Apple's hierarchical menus. The two features that quick navigators can't help but find attractive are the availability of icons in submenus for quick visual identification and the fact that placing images of hard drives won't create a tremendous system slowdown at the startup of your Mac. (Under the MacOS, the system scans every item in the hard drive folder, including aliases in the Apple Menu. An alias of a hard drive causes the system to pause and scan down the entire list of files in the "folder" (hard drive image), slowing down startup considerably.) Like the old Now Menus, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to your favorite game on the fly. However, Action Menus surpasses the old Now Manus in a number of important ways, including creating different sets of menus for different users and listing open windows. Action Menus will sell for $30 direct from PowerOn. The return of another friend in the Action line, Action WYSIWYG, returns the functionality of grouping of font families and viewing typefaces in font menus in their own font. Two major improvements over Now's older version are immediately clear: You can see ALL of your fonts in the font menu at one time by a column-based display and Action WYSIWYG allows you to dynamically switch between font names and fonts in their own font styles with a keystroke while the font menu is pulled down without closing it. Finally, for those of us who have long been adherents to Now Contact and Now Up-to-Date, the news of PowerOn purchasing and updating these venerable utilities will be welcome relief. The MenuBar components of this PIM are currently unusable on 8.6 and PowerOn is working a patch. Further, PowerOn also acquired the Windows product Eudora Planner from Qualicomm; expectations are the functionality of both programs will eventually be merged into one cross-platform PIM solution. [Jahnel] http://www.poweronsoftware.com