My day-to-day programming efforts often require I have several applications open at once. A myriad of documents of several types, a graphics editor, engineering programs, etc., are all open and viewable on my nice 21" monitor (possibly at a maximum resolution of 1600x1200 dpi, but that's too small for my poor, tired eyes). But what happens at the end of the day? I save all work in progress and shut it all down. What can I do to make it super easy to restart all these applications the next day?
Back in my OS/2 days, I had a "workplace folder" the ability to place icons that represented programs, documents, and other folders within this folder. When I opened that folder, everything inside it also opened. I missed that.
BarLaunch, a small, free program by Kuniyoshi Yagi, provides this functionality and more. The program completely stands on its own, and does not add any files to the system folder nor to the registry. To remove it, simply delete the folder you unzipped it into.
BarLaunch, for all practical purposes, duplicates Window's own Quick Launch bar. There are some things that Quick Launch cannot hold or at least, not without taking great effort to learn how to do it such as the Network Neighborhood and My Computer objects. BarLaunch can hold those objects and more. Specifically, for my needs, it can hold an object that represents a collection of objects: a group button.
The group button fires with either one of two distinct actions. The first is to merely expand out, like another bar, showing the group's contents. The other is to launch all objects in the group simultaneously. The sample bar that BarLaunch creates for you the first time it is run has one group button, typically containing Notepad, Internet Explorer, and all Office components found. When this button is set to "Launch All
" and clicked, you will find yourself confronted with a flurry of activity.
BarLaunch is completely configurable: actions, colors, icons, type of object each button represents, etc. The one singular but still significant problem with this program is that the Help file is badly translated from the author's native language. You will suffer major pains trying to understand how to tweak this program but I feel it's worth it.
BarLaunch 7.11
by Kuniyoshi Yagi
www.hi-ho.ne.jp/kyagi/enu
For Windows (all versions)
Freeware, 900K
