Macarte is available from the Mac App Store
Having used Macintosh computers since the 1990s, I had encountered how the earlier versions of macOS (then called Mac OS or even just System) handled multitasking.
Macs allowed switching between applications by one of four methods, some of which still exist today.
this would cause all windows of that application to come forward to the front layer, above the windows of other applications, although the individual windows of a particular application respected their previous layering over each other (so for example one document in the app in front of another, would stay in front of the other document).
This typically took the form of double-clicking the app's icon in the Finder, although of course you could also select it and hit Open from the File menu, or hitting Command + O on the keyboard. This would cause the application to activate similarly to clicking on one of its windows.
this would cause the app to come forward as it was already open, similar to the other two methods, but then additionally either open the new document, or bring that window to the front, if it was already open
this would cause the app to come to the front, in the similar manner to the first two methods above (clicking one of the app's windows, or double-clicking it again in the Finder).
All of the above mechanisms bar the last one still exist today in macOS. When the Mac's system software was replaced with the new version 10.0 Mac OS X (today's macOS), which was in fact a completely different Operating System based on OpenStep (previously NeXTSTEP), the application-menu didn't make the cut, instead it was kind of replaced by the Dock (as was Launcher, although now of course we also have the iOS-esque Launcher built-into macOS).
Some enterprising individuals brought their own interpretations of the application-menu to Mac OS X based systems, but these have all fallen out of updates, as far as I could tell.
This then set the stage for me to create my own solution.
The goals of Macarte was simply to bring back the Application menu, in a minimalist way, without getting bogged down in becoming an answer to every idea about multitasking or application launching. The macOS system provides various ways of multitasking and launching apps already, and there are many different application launchers already available.
So, the goal of Macarte was to be minimalist, lightweight and simple, and happily co-exist with whatever other solutions you may or may not be using.