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What's your favorite launch bar? Your favorite features? Missing Features?
VSiAQ:
I love mayk. Not a true launch bar. But it works greatly for me, a person who like to use command-line tools. :D
Just google and you'll find it. Small and really fast. Simple interface. Rich-feature. It definitely worths a try.
nontroppo:
OK, I'll be up front. I had originally demoed TrueLaunchBar and loved it (it is great software). I made all my menu's in a detailed organised hierarchy (spending quite some time). Then, I happened to stumble on the marvelous FARR, made by Mouser. I ended up not using the launch bar anymore. FARR takes the tedium and manual hard graft out of maintaining hierarches. It also learns and adapts to your computer use. It is minimalist, simple but effective[1].
Nevertheless, to keep ontopic, here are the features TrueLaunchBar has that were really great:
1) Virtual Folders: I could hook the TLB menus into my previous Start Menu hierarchy. The brilliant thing was when I added shortcuts to TLB, my custom Start Menu sections were updated automatically. Brilliant.
2) Collapsing Seperators: I could drag-n-drop links around and seperate them with titled dividing lines to give visual order. The neat thing is that seperators can be "folded"/"collapsed", so groups of programs I use infrequently didn't obscure more used programs, but a simple click would show them.
3) Recently accessed: a menu comprised of all the links I had recently used. Very useful and a bit of the creamy goodness of FARRs adaptivity in the normally static world of launch bars.
4) I never used this but it sounds very smart — auto-sensing toolbars! Basically, the menu structure can be linked to the active application. So if you are running a text editor, you could have a menu of coding utilities close to hand!!!
5) Aesthetics: Quite simply, it is very flexible in terms of fonts / colours / icons / number of columns / view types. You can get a really visually pleasant interface out out of it!
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[1] It reminds me of when I dropped The Bat as a mail client; brilliant and rich functionality, but based on the flawed model of foldered email management. An much more basic mail client that used a database engine, without bells-n-whistles, won over it because the underlying concept was "better".
nontroppo:
I've made a mockup of how it would be possible to use FARR as a launchbar type app while still allowing it to work well as an adaptive launch maestro. Mouser, this seems far more beneficial to you; one code base to manage and less overhead.
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=2272.0
XMinus1:
My current favorite is Pegtop's PStart. I use alternative shells: GeoShell for a bit, years ago, then Litestep for the last few years, now happily back to Geoshell. I found the perfect LS theme for my needs, so for years I didn't need a stand-alone app launcher. Now that I've returned to GS I need some way to manage all of my apps. PStart is the perfect tool for me: drag and drop capablity, simple and straightforward. my favorite feature is it's ability to be invoked by the mouse, just where the cursor is at, by configuring the mouse to pass on a particular button click as a global keystroke, i.e. I no longer have to move the cursor to the systray to start apps. Of course, that's not a unique feature, but it's nice that such a relatively small app has just those features that are critical to me. I like it's simplicity: it's not the one-stop-shop that some app-launchers aspire to.
I used Kana Launcher, another small launcher, but had problems with it after I rebuilt and reloaded my WinXP box, so I gave it up for PStart.
tinyvillager:
Thought maybe i'd pend it to this thread,don't know...
Microsoft has a new launch bar...groupbar
http://research.microsoft.com/vibe/groupbar.aspx
"GroupBar requires no installation - just download the executable (GroupBar.exe) and run it. (Put in in your start-up group to run it automatically on start-up.) Note: creating Snapshots with the GroupBar produces .gss files in the same folder as GroupBar.exe, so save it in its own folder if you would like to avoid cluttering up other folders. GroupBar requires no uninstallation either - simply delete GroupBar.exe and any Snapshot (.gss) files it has created, and it is gone."
P.S.
There's an Internal
http://msrweb/vibe/groupbar/install.aspx<-get a 404 on that one
And an external
http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/
I'm confused :huh:
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