NeXTSTEP menus were (and still are) awesome. I've never had the opportunity to use a real NeXT box (or even OpenSTEP), but I've had enough experience with WindowMaker and tearing off menus in GTK+ to know its true. For those who don't know, menus in NeXTSTEP float around in their own window as shown in the shot on the left. You can drag them around by their title bar and put them where you want. You can even drag around submenus, in which case they become a permanent fixture (at least until you close them) so you can quickly access common functions, even if they are buried several levels deep (of course a common item should never be that deep in the menu).
I recently bought a Powerbook and am liking it and OS X very much. At least until I hooked up a second monitor then I had to keep moving back and forth between monitors to access the application menu. I decided to do something about my predicament so I started working on StepMenus. It mimics the NeXT style menus for all Cocoa applications. The results aren't (yet) perfect, but it is still quite handy.
The minimum requirements for StepMenus is OS X 10.2. You must have 10.3 for dynamic menu updates to work.
Sadly StepMenus will only work with Cocoa applications, so you won't get the menu in Carbon apps like Firefox.
Lots of people are reporting installation problems, so here are some manual installation/removal instructions.
To uninstall, just remove all the files copied in the installation. You can also install into /Library for all users.
Download the disk image and install using the program within. Since StepMenus loads itself into every Cocoa application you run it may cause applications to crash. If this happens, use the preference pane to disable StepMenus in the troublesome application, or if things are really drastic disable StepMenus for all applications.