Well now launchy has reached the beta stage of it’s development, so it’s time to test it and review this early adopters release.

Since version 1.0 this amazing utility has come a long way, with lots of fans and many plugins written for it from gcal to iTuny going through Todoist, Opery, etc… (plugins forum), to a total rewrote from scratch in order to use Qt as it’s UI component and using for background coding C++.

There has been some mayor UI changes, the Alpha rendering it’s much better and doesn’t dissapear after a hibernate on my laptop. Launchy now respects the parameters case so if you send Play it remains as is and doesn’t lowercase it, the options dialog is much more tidy, so is the main interface.

Launchy beta 1 comes with a new skin and a new icon as you can see here:

The new skin gives launchy an improved look and feel, and the new icon makes it easy to find and relate to the keyboard and the launch action.

if you right-click on the interface it shows you the option and the exit menu entries.

You can access the options clicking on the icon on the top-right corner of launchy.

The General Options had a facelift too and had some extras added to it, like the ability to control launchy’s transparency and fade in/out time in that can be set with the sliders.

You can change the shortcut keys to activate and deactivate launchy, as the rest of the previous 1.0 options.

The Skins Dialog had a revamp to, now you can have a preview of the skin, the skinner’s info and the selection list of your currently installed skins.

By default Launchy comes with 4 skins, Black Glass, Mercury, Quicksilver2 and the default shown on the screenshot.

The skin format changed too, now instead of an .ini file, the skin is configured with a .qss file.

The Catalog is now where you define the folders you want launchy to scan for your files, shortcuts, mp3’s, video files, documents, etc…

As you can see in the screenshot, the dialog changed alot from version 1.0 and it’s much more organized, there are two checkboxes there that says Executables (to index exe files) and Directories (to search on the folders subdirectories), the depth in which you want launchy to submerge in your folder tree, a button to rescan the folders, and more.

By default launchy comes with 3 folders to index, your start menu, the shared start menu and the Utilities folder.

If you are thinking in testing this version keep in mind that your old configurations need some backup before installing and running launchy 2 beta 1. I had some trouble with this when I first started launchy 2 beta 1, because it overwrote my config files and all my previous indexed folders where no more on the Catalog tab, so i had to reconfigure launchy to search on my folders, add the filetypes, etc…

The Plugins dialog has a more organized face, the plugin list on the left and the properties (if the plugin has) on the right. In this screenshot is the Weby properties dialog.

The checkbox let’s you activate or deactivate the plugin.

Weby has now included Foxy and the internet explorer indexing plugins.

Well this is the description on the new beta of launchy, this new version comes with really great improvements and features.

I just came across with some issues at first start, like iTunes and iLike not playing well when I start them from launchy (for some weird reason that i still don’t actually get), but a restart of my laptop restore everything to normal, and this seems more a problem of the iLike bar and iTunes than Launchy’s fault.

So, if you want to test this beta, keep in mind this… It’s a BETA, so there are still some bugs that need to get fixed, but the overall experience was really great.

My advice, wait for the v2.0 to be released, it’s going to be an amazing release.

Launchy website
Launchy 2 beta discusson forum and Download

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