Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on January 31, 2007 by CyberNet.

I’ve had several people email me in the past week telling me what a great application Launchy is, and I realized that which is why I wrote about it back in September of 2006. At first I just thought that it was some new people stumbling upon the application, but then Radu pointed out that this is the final 1.0 release which just happened on January 23.

Launchy is a nifty little application that will let you launch applications simply by starting to type the name of the program in the window. With Launchy 1.0, however, you can do even more! 

So what’s new? I pulled up the forum and it looks like Launchy supports plug-ins to make your experience even better!

• Launchy now supports plugins! Check out the “Plugins” folder inside your Launchy directory, you can add and remove plugins from there when Launchy is not running. Following are the plugins that come with Launchy by default, I expect many others to be developed by myself and the community.
  • Weby Plugin
    

    Perform Web Searches: Launchy now supports the following search keywords: google, msn, yahoo, live, weather, amazon, wikipedia, dictionary, thesaurus, imdb, netflix, and msdn websearch. Type in any of these keywords, hit tab, type in your search query, and hit enter!

    Add custom web searches: Please see Quicksearches in the Foxy plugin

    Launch Webpages: Type in the url such as ‘www.launchy.net’ or ‘http://www.launchy.net’ and hit enter

  • Foxy Plugin
    

    Bookmarks: The Foxy plugin will automatically load your FireFox bookmarks into the database. Just search for them as you would applications.

    Quick searches: Launchy loads Firefox quick searches and will index the keyword into the database. Use it like you would a web search.

  • Explory Plugin
    

    Browse: Type in c: and then hit tab, now type in a couple letters of the next directory, and hit tab. You can press enter at anytime to launch the currently selected file or folder. Notice, you must tab after each file/folder.

    Browse from shortcut: If you type in “my docu”, hit tab, and then type in “my musi” and hit tab, Launchy will switch into browsing mode. Any directory or shortcut to a directory can convert into browsing mode.

  • Calcy Plugin
    

    Calculate: Type in some math.. Launchy will figure out what you want to do. Warning: This calculator is limited to +,/,-,* and parenthesis.

• Now Ctrl+Backspace deletes a word at a time and Alt+Backspace clears the text 
• Too many bug fixes to count or remember!

As this program keeps getting new features it continues to become more and more useful. It is skinnable so you can make it look however you like, and I have to admit that it has a lot of eye appeal to it.

Now that Vista has both indexed searching and a sidebar with gadgets built-in I think some of these other companies, like Google, will be looking to extend their applications feature set to help increase its appeal. If they start adding features similar to what Launchy offers then I think more people will consider downloading their desktop search application. I really don’t know what else these search application can add because they definitely won’t be able to compete with Vista’s integrated search feature!

Download Launchy

 Thanks to everyone who sent in this tip!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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