Quick Launch 1.0

37 Responses to “Quick Launch 1.0”

1. Tom Ray Says:
   February 3rd, 2009 at 11:51 pm

   It would be very nice on the next update of this new gadget if you could force a focus on the flyout window when it opens. At the present, time it takes two clicks of the mouse to activate a shortcut in the flyout…one to gain focus on the flyout and then one to activate the specific shortcut or URL. I’m referring to folders that contain a list of shortcuts.

2. The Staff Says:
   February 4th, 2009 at 2:03 pm

   Tom, we’re currently testing out an optional fix in the next update for the XM gadget that if it works well, will definetely go into Quick Launch.

3. DGrant Says:
   February 5th, 2009 at 10:07 am

   It would be nice if the Quick Launch allows users to increase the link icons for better viewing.

   Also, can you add an export/import link settings option? Need it for backup.

   Good work !

4. Yahya Says:
   February 9th, 2009 at 3:41 pm

   It is quite a nice and very useful gadget, however I am having a problem re-arranging the icons. I can drag icons shortcuts from my desktop and all (about 20) will be displayed in the gadget window. When I attempt to manage shortcuts and/or add dividers, all shortcuts disappear when I click on the “manage shortcuts” buttons again. I tried re-booting, re-installing, but in vain…
   Any suggestions?

5. The Staff Says:
   February 9th, 2009 at 7:27 pm

   Yahya, That’s definetly interesting. Try going into the Settings panel of the gadget -> Help -> Open data folder and delete the .xml files that you find.

   This will erase all of the data, but give it another shot and let us know if that helps or does nothing. We’ll take a look and see if we can replicate this issue on our end.

6. Andriuxa Says:
   February 11th, 2009 at 12:19 pm

   I wasn’t able to add more than 4 links.
   I’ve tried by dragging also by editing Quick-Launch-Shortcuts.xml.
   Is this one of gadget’s limitation?

7. The Staff Says:
   February 11th, 2009 at 5:33 pm

   Andriuxa, can you add dividers and other preset shortcuts to the gadget? This is one of the odder problems we’ve seen with this gadget so far, so try restarting the sidebar, open and close the manage flyout and drag new icons onto the presets (if they don’t highlight) and see if that helps.

8. Andriuxa Says:
   February 12th, 2009 at 5:42 am

   Thank you very much, it works fine. I’ve reopened sidebar added a divider after this everything works as expected

9. Bert Says:
   February 16th, 2009 at 3:48 pm

   Nice work, outstanding appearance & all. But quirky:

   - Added a printer, came up with the computer icon instead of the printer icon (yet works just fine). Would be nice if we could select icons for items.

   - Again, being able to specify different icons would be great for folders. Being able to specify for each folder whether to display a flyout or to open the folder would be a great asset too (I really have folders of both types, and I suspect most people do as well).

   - Added shortcuts, worked fine until I moved them. They disappeared (as expected), but now I cannot add them again from their new location…

   - Re-arranging the gadgets is an odd task right now. Would be nice if you moved the cursor back onto the same arrow button right after you moved the item in the list. That way, moving an item by several slots would be a simple matter of clicking multiple times.

   Thanks, and keep up the good work!

10. Yan S Says:
    February 21st, 2009 at 5:08 pm

    1. This gadget would be perfect if there was a way to customize the icons. Right now it seems to revert some of my icons to something nonsensical (outlook –> my computer icon; flip3d –> blank page icon; show desktop –> my computer icon; etc….) It’s REALLY annoying.
    2. It would be nice if we could make the gadget smaller as well.

    Other than that it’s the best quicklauncher I’ve used!

11. John Says:
    February 25th, 2009 at 5:18 am

    As soon as I put in 20 shortcuts it reverts to the initial display with Computer, control panel, explorer and recycle bin. If the gadget is closed and restarted it just comes back with the black background and no icons. Tried deleting the XML file and redoing it. Also tried with a divider but still no go. I am using Win 7.

12. W Jackson Says:
    March 1st, 2009 at 1:30 pm

    I like the functionality of Quick Launch; this is exactly the tool I’ve been looking for.

    Unfortunately, it doesn’t maintain the custom icon I gave the shortcut and there is no way to assign custom icons within the program. In some cases this gives me two-three programs all with the same basic icon.

    Because of this the tool is unable to provide me the functionality I need. I’ll be watching it’s development with keen interest. Keep up the good work.

13. Byte Corrupto Says:
    March 12th, 2009 at 4:31 pm

    Thank you for add supor for Opera Bookmarks!

14. Erehwon Says:
    March 13th, 2009 at 10:00 am

    I have the same issues about the ability to assign different icons to the shortcuts. I have a couple of feature requests:

    1) Support named linkes, I don’t always want to use an icon, but rather a simple name.
    2) Allow the ability to change icons, so you can actually know what your’re clicking on.

    For me, this is an unusable gadget as I don’t have the time to click each folder trying to figure out what icon take me where. I think the has to do with the fact that my shortcuts are pointed to server. It looks like the folder that are local to my machine work as expected.

15. Brian Sexton Says:
    March 14th, 2009 at 9:43 am

    I started a launcher gadget quite some time ago but I never finished it. It is good to see one that is farther along than mine was, but I found several issues that I would like to see addressed in a future version. Here are a few of them:

    1. Dragging a file or folder to the gadget almost always fails. Either the drop is visibly forbidden with a slash-through circle icon or nothing happens when the icon is dropped. Obviously, this makes the widget mostly useless for custom shortcuts since your “Add Custom” button triggers only a message about doing the thing that does not work rather than offering a form-driven alternative (which would be nice).

    2. A shortcut to a shortcut seems a little silly. I think shortcuts should be duplicated (including any special parameters) rather than linked, at least as an option.

    3. The displayed name of a folder with a period in the name was truncated to the part of the name before the period. I don’t know if that also happens with files since dragging and dropping is no longer working for me at all, but I would prefer to see the whole name of any file, including anything resembling an extension.

    You can also add my voice to those who would like to see icon customization, name customization, and a persistent flyout that can receive drops. And if you’re in a particularly enhancement-happy mood, path display. Without either name customization or path display, someone wanting to keep shortcuts to multiple project folders might end up with no way to differentiate identically named folders (e.g., “Images”, “Assets”, or “public_html”).

    Good luck with this!

16. Jim Kanya Says:
    April 7th, 2009 at 3:35 pm

    I have been looking (craving!?!) something this except… I am a remote user and the shortcuts I want to link are on a corporate network. The sidebar comes up first, checks for the shortcuts, all before I can connect to the corporate network via VPN. Can you incorporate a checkbox that would automatically check the shortcuts instead of forcing it?

    Thanks…

17. Tyler T. Says:
    September 1st, 2009 at 2:11 am

    So has anything been done about customizing the shortcuts so we can have custom icons?

18. The Staff Says:
    September 1st, 2009 at 6:32 pm

    Tyler, we’re working on updating multiple gadgets right now. Quick Launch is on the list, just not being worked on just yet. We’ll announce it when we get the gadget updated.

19. Buttonpushin Mom Says:
    September 9th, 2009 at 3:41 pm

    Quick Launch works great. The only problem I am having is in organization. How do I “shuffle” my icons? I have been using this for sometime and have loved it. Things were organized the way I wanted them but after my last addition — I was unable to arrange things the way I would prefer. Any suggestions?

20. The Staff Says:
    September 9th, 2009 at 4:08 pm

    You should be able to get into the organization flyout by clicking the gear button on the bottom of the gadget. From there you can move items up or down or delete in a list fashion. The gadget isn’t able to shuffle icons yet. Let us know if the controls for each link aren’t working and we’ll see what we can do from there to restore functionality.

21. zm Says:
    September 20th, 2009 at 2:57 am

    This is a nice gadget to use!
    but is it possible to hide file extensions?

    as I am using a folder on the gadget and I see my applications shortcuts as .lnk

22. Craig Says:
    October 8th, 2009 at 3:47 pm

    Nice gadget.

    Feature request: shell context menu when you right click on an icon.

    Cheers!

23. The Staff Says:
    October 8th, 2009 at 4:39 pm

    Hi zm, thanks for your nice comment. To answer your question, it is possible to hide file extensions. We will look into incorporating that into our next update.

    Hi Craig, We appreciate the compliment. We will add your suggestion to our list for consideration int he next update.

24. Mike Says:
    October 14th, 2009 at 3:05 pm

    This is a great gadget, the only thing i could think of that would make it better is if you can have multiple Quick Launch boxes. This is so i can keep my school stuff in one box, programs i use alot in another, etc…

    Thanks for the great tool!
    Mike

25. The Staff Says:
    October 14th, 2009 at 3:39 pm

    Hi Mike. Glad that you like Quick Launch. If you haven’t tried already, click on the Add More Gadgets button and drag the Quick Launch icon into your sidebar. If you already have one running, this should create a second instance which you can customize as you wish. Let us know if that works for you.

26. Magnus Says:
    November 5th, 2009 at 2:22 pm

    Thank you for a great gadget!

    One annoying bug that took me a while too find out. The gadget will empty all your shortcuts if you add shortcut from a folder with a name with character “&”. For example, try add a shortcut from a folder called “tools & programs”, it will fail.

    I also miss a one function, why not have button in the “manage”-view called “Add your Quick Launch shortcuts from toolbar”

    Thank you!

    Magnus

27. The Staff Says:
    November 5th, 2009 at 6:18 pm

    Hi Magnus, Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We will look into this and will post when we have a fix out. This gadget is due for a big update at some point so we might include this issue with that rollout.

28. Bronwyn Says:
    November 16th, 2009 at 12:11 am

    I have the same problem as John below. Is there anyway of saving all the shortcuts so if this happens again (already 3 times for me) i can simply used the saved file to reinstall them.
    I love it and use it all the time. I use several of your other gadgets as well. date & time, twitter explorer, facebook, system control, Many thanks for great products.

    [John Says:
    February 25th, 2009 at 5:18 am

    As soon as I put in 20 shortcuts it reverts to the initial display with Computer, control panel, explorer and recycle bin. If the gadget is closed and restarted it just comes back with the black background and no icons. Tried deleting the XML file and redoing it. Also tried with a divider but still no go.]

29. The Staff Says:
    November 16th, 2009 at 1:53 pm

    Bronwyn, we’re looking into some of these problems for a possible update sometime in the relatively near future. To get a current list of the shortcuts being used in the gadget, head to the Settings Panel -> Help -> Click the link on the bottom of the panel to open up the data files for the gadget and grab the “Quick-Launch-Shortcuts.xml” file. You should be able to use this to restore the shortcuts in the gadget should it go bonkers again.

30. friskydiscus Says:
    November 19th, 2009 at 11:56 am

    Hi
    I’ve been using this for a while and thought I should offer some feedback:

    a) The gadget recently started slowing down and became unusable. I tried uninstalling, deleting settings files etc without result and I nearly deleted the gadget for good. Then I emptied my recycle bin (which was quite full!)and it works a charm again. Unfortunately it seems your gadget interacts with the recycle bin in some way every time you hover the mouse over it so I only realised what was going on when I tried another similar gadget (which only did the same when you hovered over the recycle bin icon, rather than anywhere on the gadget) I dont use folder shortcuts on this so I dont know if this issue applies to other windows folder when they are dropped on the gadget – maybe this is why some other users are finding the gadget unusable.

    b) I use a lot of portable applications and have sometimes dropped shortcuts for these on the gadget. Although the apps launch it seems in some cases instead of using the application’s portable profile it creates a local profile. This is probably a quirk in the way portable applications are launched rather than a fault in the gadget (I find the same thing if Vista launches for example a portable browser from say a link in an email, but not paradoxically from a shortcut or in the Vista quick launch tray). Anyway I thought I would mention it…

    Otherwise an excellent gadget that does what it says on the tin!

31. shannon Says:
    November 19th, 2009 at 12:52 pm

    The only problem I have with this program is the inability to include ‘titles’ with each icon. I work with a number of database files that have the same icon and would be fantastic if I could label the icons…just include the file name beside the icon as an option. This would make this program usable for me as now it is not. But fantastic start! With the loss of the quick launch toolbars in windows 7, this is a key app!!

    Thanks!

32. The Staff Says:
    November 19th, 2009 at 12:59 pm

    friskydiscus, the gadget does interact with the recycle bin, keeping track of the item count and allowing the user to delete items or clear the bin. It’s been a while since we built the gadget though, so no doubt there is a better way to get that working. We’ll pass that along though for any user running into problems. The portable applications thing is interesting, though no idea why it would do that.

33. The Staff Says:
    November 19th, 2009 at 1:04 pm

    Shannon, Not sure how we could title the icons given some of the spacing on the gadget, but we’ll take this into consideration for the next update, maybe we can do something with it in an alternate layout. Thanks for the suggestion.

34. RD Says:
    November 28th, 2009 at 8:56 am

    I’m not sure whether to post in System Control or Quick Launch.

    System Control has a relative timer… Quick Launch has custom shortcuts.

    Anyway you could make the timer be absolute as well as relative… and …allow for shortcuts to have such a timer? Seems like good features for System Control… but Quick Launch is for custom shortcuts, so… I guess I’ll leave the suggestion here and not double-post to System Control (although it’s own timer could desperately use an absolute timer… like shutdown at 10pm, instead of just in 10 hours).

35. The Staff Says:
    November 28th, 2009 at 4:53 pm

    RD, the timer on System Control was built for people that wanted to shut their machines off in a couple hours. We’ll consider adding in a more absolute timer. Adding in custom shortcuts for System Control is something we’re already planning on adding in as well as a possible timer option for Quick Launch.

36. Cristina Says:
    January 22nd, 2010 at 2:20 am

    The gadget only allows me to include one folder other than the preset Documents folder. Is there anyway of changing this? I would like to have various folders at once on the gadget.

37. The Staff Says:
    January 22nd, 2010 at 8:51 am

    Cristina, the gadget should be able to handle multiple folders. Not sure why it wouldn’t be able to do more, maybe try resetting the gadget’s data files (Gadget Settings -> Help -> Bottom instructions). We’re going to have to revisit the gadget at some point in the future to try and stabilize the functionality.