Two Windows launcher utilities

Friday 25 February 2005 — This is close to 20 years old. Be careful.

I’m trying two different utilities:

Free Launch Bar is a replacement for Windows’ built-in Quick Launch. It’s a toolbar that sits on the taskbar, letting you launch programs. I like it because it does the right thing with subfolders (makes them sub-menus, rather than launching Explorer on the folder). It isn’t flashy, but it is solid and does its job well. It’s a loss leader for True Launch Bar, which has so many features I can’t even organize them mentally.

ObjectDock is a replacement for the Windows taskbar. It’s basically a Windows implementation of the OS X dock, and it is quite faithful (and therefore, quite flashy). It is also free, with more features available for money in ObjectDock Plus.

Comments

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Dan Gottlieb 6:39 PM on 25 Feb 2005
Ned,

This is a little different from the utilities you list in your post, but I recently released a free launcher (http://www.capslink.com) where you can associate applications and websites with letters and numbers and then open them by holding down the Caps Lock key and pressing the appropriate letter or number key. The app is primarily geared towards launching and searching websites, but Windows applications should work too. Plus, the website backend is written in Python :).

- Dan
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Alex 8:59 PM on 25 Feb 2005
Checkout AppRocket too - I've been fairly pleased with it.
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Stefano J. Attardi 11:38 PM on 26 Feb 2005
I second the AppRocket suggestion. It has totaly changed the way I use Windows.

While previously I had to reach for the mouse to launch apps through the start panel, now I can do almost everything without a mouse. I just type in a few characters of the app/file I need and it opens.

No more need to browse for files either. It also works as a simple desktop search as long as you remember your file names.
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Tony 9:10 AM on 27 Feb 2005
check out AppRocket. I am very please with it and I am a mac convert. It is only a bit slow at initial indexing but once things are indexed, it does "the right thing".... also some other goodies in my quest to make XP behave like OS-X(P) without taking too many resources or making it crash.....
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Ned Batchelder 9:21 AM on 27 Feb 2005
I've tried AppRocket before, and somehow it didn't do it for me. But on the strength of these recommendations, I'll try it again. Either I'll end up using it, or I'll pay closer attention to what I don't like about it! :-)
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Pete McKinstry 12:01 AM on 2 Mar 2005
Thanks Ned. As soon as you said it supported sub-folders, i was sold.

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