I have quickly grown quite fond of this program. It is a free Windows program, similar in concept to the commercial app ActiveWords which I demoed for a while, but it never stuck with me for some reason.
It’s basically a little command-line that you can bring up by pressing a key (Windows+Q by default) and then you can type “MagicWords” to launch programs, go to URLs, etc… I’ve setup words to take me to certain web sites I use at work, email myself, lock the computer, go to “Program Files” or “My Documents”, etc… It just seems much easier to me to use the keyboard than to hunt around for the proper shortcut and shortcuts , whether on the Desktop or in the QuickLaunch bar, take up screen real estate and make things seem cluttered. I strive to have my desktop as clutter-free and Zen-like as possible and this helps me have that and still be able to launch things quickly.
So to recap, my favorite productivity-enhancing programs, in rough order of decreasing usefulness to me:
* StrokeIt [ my blog post ]
* Thunderbird with Quick File extension [ my blog post ]
* SlickRun
* AutoHotkey [ my blog post ]
What are yours?
Have you tried PC-Com? It’s similar to SlickRun but has dozens of features. The web site for PC-Com is http://www.boletrice.com/pccom.
Have you tried SmartStartMenu?
http://www.planetharrington.con/products/smartstartmenu
Is another clean little launcher that resolves shortcuts from your startmenu and desktop… or from anywhere you want.
SlickRun is definitely a great little app. Only thing I don’t like is installing the delphi runtime libs. Before I settled on using slickrun I was using a Yahoo! widget called Launch It which worked great, but since I don’t need any other widgets right now, slickrun is better.
(funny side note: I recently posted an article on stuff like this, if you’re interested check out 3 Applications to Make PC Life Easier