Sunday, August 13, 2006

Time is money... Stop using your Quick Launch or Start menu

Do you have a list of 30+ icons of applications you use daily in you Quick Launch taskbar and you turned on its auto-hide feature? Do you try to actively manage your Start/Programs folders to make it easier for you to find and launch applications? Are you running out of keyboard shortcuts to launch your favourite applications? If you say yes to all these questions, chances are you are a power keyboard-driven user of your computer. It's simply a breeze without having to move your hands away from the keyboard and do everything on your computer.

To add more ammunition to you keyboard freaks, download and try Colibri. This is an application that lets you launch your apps by simply typing in a pattern that matches your apps' names! I mapped it to the F12 key on my laptop. When I want to launch Firefox, I press F12, then type in "fox", and hit enter and it is launched; When I want to launch MSN Messenger, I press F12, type in "mess", hit enter and it is launched...

It's pretty much similar to Google Desktop, but in GD after typing I have to use the up and down arrows multiple times to nav away from other doc types to get to app's exe. Colibri is strictly for app launching. If I type in "mess" for MSN Messenger, it will remember that you have used it to launch MSN Messenger, so next time rather than suggesting you to launch Y! Messenger it will default to MSN Messenger, while letting you to arrow down to select Y! Messenger should you want to.

I rarely use my Quick Launch or my Start menu anymore...

Bonus Tip 1: Did you know shift-F10 opens up your mouse right-click menu?
Bonus Tip 2: Turn on your "Begin finding when you begin typing" feature in your Firefox. I use this to "type-and-hit-enter" to surf the web =P

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you love QuickLaunch, you would really love QuickSilver on the Mac. Apple-Space brings up a dialog, where you can bring up anything in your computer, not just start applications. Type in a contact name, for example, and you will create an email addressed to them.

But, it's only for the mac...

Anonymous said...

I moved from Colibri to Launchy, mainly because it's just a little bit closer to Quicksilver. Only 99% of the way to go.

Anonymous said...

Google desktop does a great job of this as well. As long as your happy to allow it to index every single file in your harddisk ;-). But their solution does seem quite elegant.

Katy said...

Very useful information and thanks for sharing. Street Chaser Mod Apk