True Launch Bar: good in 2004, great for UMPCs in '06 and beyond

It was almost two years ago today that James featured a review of True Launch Bar. Back in 2004 James named it a "best utility" here at jkOTR. So is it still around and if so, would it be a "best utility" in 2006? Thanks to the small screened UMPCs and other handhelds, I'd say yes it is based on the Flash-based video demo alone. You can also get a quick peek at the functions by clicking the above pic, which is an animated .GIF.

True Launch Bar could be described as your Taskbar on steroids. You can customize the icons, create virtual folders, add useful plugins and more. One of the challenges we small-screen device owners face daily is the amount of usable real-estate on the screen. Simple tasks like finding and executing a program can be a struggle, which is the reason every Origami-based UMPC device comes with the Microsoft Touch Pack software. I think that's a great first step, but I personally never use it to launch programs simply because it's a standalone program. I want easy access my programs natively on my desktop environment and it sure looks to me like True Launch Bar will do just that.

I'll be downloading the demo, which you can find right here. If you like True Launch Bar, you can purchase a license for $19.90. I also see that the developers have a beta version for Windows Vista, so it would appear to me that TLB has a future. If you have a UMPC, or any other Tablet PC for that matter, it might be worth a look.

Comments

[scoobie]

While we're on the topic of useful utilities - can anyone please recommend any software to identify and tidy up duplicate files and IE bookmarks? I merged 2 PC's together and I have *lots* of duplicate files I'd like to tidy up to free up disc space and generally remove clutter. Googling tells me there are a lot of utilities out there that do this, so many in fact that I don't know where to start

[JTHesse]

Today you can get the True LaunchBar for free:

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/true-launch-bar/