Team Player Award: Launchy + Google Chrome

In this post I want to recognize excellence in working together. The combination of Launchy and Google Chrome is making my digital life pretty effortless lately. Together, they allow me to start or open anything easily and quickly.

Launchy has been working for me for a while, and it’s long been a favourite over at Lifehacker, which is a favourite of my own. Launchy pops up instantly when you hit a customizable key combination – I use Win+Space – and offers an attractive little box into which you type something that you want to open. By default it indexes everything on your start menu, and a few other default things. It also learns what your favourites are, so after a few times you have to type less and less of what you want. So, for example, right now I just have to hit Win+Space, type the letter “F” and hit enter and it starts freecell, since that’s the only thing I use that starts with F. It even seems to know what you want if you scramble the letters, however.

Here’s how it works nicely with Google Chrome, however: Chrome lets you create “application shortcuts” out of web pages that you use. You just choose “create application shortcut” from the dropdown menu to the right of the address bar and presto, it creates a link to that web page on your desktop, start menu and/or quick launch bar. This shortcut gets an icon from the website itself. When you launch the shortcut, it starts that webpage, but without any sign of Chrome. You just see a title bar with the usual close/maximize buttons, like any other program, and the web page itself in effect becomes the application you are using. Chrome seems to remember how you size each application, so a web site that only needs a small window will start up in a small window once you have resized to to the size you want.

Now, since I do so much computing online (google maps, google reader, lifehacker, gmail, facebook, etc. etc.) this can save several steps of first starting my browser, then opening my bookmarks, finding the folder, and then the bookmark I want, etc. Since the shortcuts can go on the start menu, Launchy finds them so I just have to activate launchy, type the first few letters of the web site, and it’s ready to go and it launches without any other distractions. No mouse required, and fast! Also, since I use a lot of google apps, these tend to work very well with Google Chrome as well, so that’s a nice bonus.

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