Superfast application launching with Launchy!

Picture this: You are in the middle of typing something in your editor and suddenly you realize the whole thing would be a lot more pleasant if you had some music on. So to open Winamp, you minimize all your open windows and then you find there’s no Winamp shortcut on your desktop because you didn’t want to clutter it. And so you take your hand off the keyboard, move it all the way to your mouse, then click on Start > Program Files, and then start searching for the entry which says Winamp. Way too much trouble to do all this whenever you want to launch anything, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just type, say Win + W and have Winamp come up? Launchy may not be able to do that, but it certainly makes application launching a lot less painful.

Here’s how: Launchy indexes all your installed programs and starts during your system start-up, so when you want to launch an application, all you have to do is press Alt + Space (or any other key combination of your choice) and type in the first few letters of your application. Press enter and voila! Your application has been launched!

Launchy also comes with a bunch of plugins that help you do more. For example, the installer comes with plugins that index control panel applications and let you use launcy as a calculator, browse files and more. Lifehacker provides good articles on Launchy here and here. It comes with a bunch of skins too, though I think the default one is good enough for me.

Happy Launching!

Reader – The Google way of managing feeds

Edit: Reader now has a search bar. And you can hide the side navigation too.

I finally tried out Google Reader today (don’t know what took me so long). Reader is Google’s RSS/Atom feed reading tool, which allows you to subscribe to websites. This means that whenever the website is updated, you’ll be able to read it (full articles or summaries as the case may be) inside Reader. Obviously, it’s a great way of keeping track of new material posted on websites without having to open each website everyday. Of course, the website has to offer feeds for this to work.

So how good is Reader? Like all things Google, Reader’s biggest plus is its simple and easy-to-use UI. It took me less than two minutes to subscribe to a bunch of websites. You can subscribe by entering the feed URL of the website and if you don’t know it, you can just type the keywords and the search option will give you one. For certain social sites (Blogger, LJ, Flickr, etc) you can simply enter the user name of your friend, which makes the whole thing very simple. I see WordPress missing from the list, so you’ll have to add me manually. Categorizing them is also simple enough and in an instant, all my friends’ blogs went into the Blogs folder. The amazing thing is, you can actually share your Reader with others using the URL Google provides you.

On the downside, Reader cannot recognize if you have already subscribed to a site if you have changed its name. Of course, it is still under development, so I’m sure it will be fixed (if it wasn’t intended to behave like that).

For those who don’t want to use browser add-ons to read stuff from their favorite sites, Reader provides an excellent option, since everyone has a Google account anyway. To subscribe to this blog, use the RSS URL http://prasannapandit.wordpress.com/feed/ .