FutureMillennium Web.net

SaneBar 0.1.1: New Quick Launch feature

1st November 2009

A new version of SaneBar, a nifty utility application developed by (you guessed it) me, was just released today! It brings a new exciting feature called Quick Launch, which, however, is completely unlike the quick launch you may all know.

But first, what exactly is SaneBar? Basically, it's a toolbar that sits at the top of your screen and acts like the title bar of a maximized window, even when the current active window isn't maximized. What this means is that not only it doesn't occupy any space you can't use (like the start bar does), but you can access window features much faster, because you can just throw your mouse to the top right corner and close the active window, regardless where or how small it is. Same goes for maximizing/restoring, where you can just double click the bar anywhere.

One of the other useful features it has is a "hot-zone" in the top left corner – just move your mouse to the top left corner of your screen to reveal your desktop. This is very handy when you often find yourself minimizing programs to access shortcuts or files on your desktop. Throw your mouse to the corner, launch a shortcut, the swoop it to the corner again and all your windows are back! This also works when dragging files, which makes it possible to drag or extract files to your desktop even when your screen is cluttered with windows.

What Quick Launch brings to this is that you can middle click anywhere on SaneBar, hold the button down, throw your mouse in any of the 8 directions (or just leave it where it is, in the middle) and release the button, thus launching any of your 9 configured applications or files incredibly quickly! Because you don't have to hunt down any tiny icons or shortcuts with your mouse, and instead use a couple of quick hand motions and just a single click, the speed of this is unmatched by any other ways of launching apps you may be accustomed to, including the desktop, the quick launch bar or the start menu. If you decide that you don't want to launch any applications after all, you can just right click while holding the middle button (releasing it launches an app), which cancels the operation.

This is one of the features that SaneBar is worth using for, was worth making for and that I'm very proud of. So grab it already and give it a try!

0 Comments · Post a Comment!