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Is your Start Menu 6 columns wide? Do you spend more time finding a program than you spend using it? Then kbLaunch will make your life easier. kbLaunch is an application / document launcher that uses abbreviations to quickly find what you need.

Overview

I want to do the same amount of work in a shorter amount of time. This increases the amount of time I can spend slacking. kbLaunch is one way to accomplish this. This program is aimed at keyboard power users that want a fast and to the point program launching experience. This is a reaction against the alpha blended, animated, effect heavy launching experience that the world seems to be moving towards.

kbLaunch operates on the principle that you know what you want to run. You know what it's called and how to type it. Why spend time visually browsing for the program you want to run? Launching or activating applications should be as simple and fast as a web search.

The search algorithm is designed to allow you to quickly generate abbreviations for the programs or documents that you need to use. For example, when you first run bLaunch there are no abbreviations defined. So to launch Microsoft Outlook, you'd type "Outlook" and select Microsoft outlook from the list and hit enter. Then the next time you try to launch outlook you can type 'o' and it'll be waiting at the top of the list. What you type can appear anywhere in the program or documents name, and eventually the programs you use the most will bubble to the top with the shortest abbreviations.

kbLaunch currently supports searching the following places:

You can also quickly add: webpages, email addresses, and files that are not currently in those locations. Find out about all of the features on the documentation page.

Screenshots

Main launching screen:

Running programs screen:

Registration

kbLaunch is a CoffeeWare application. You can try it out for a long as you want, but you have to pay me $8.99 (the price of a pound of coffee beans) to register it and get rid to the nag screen. After purchasing, you can use kbLaunch on any machine that you use frequently. Purchase it through Plimus.

Copyright 2005 Brian Richardson