Launchy is a skinnable app launcher with a twist. Instead of just showing all the apps you can run, it has a search field you can use to search for the app you want to run in your start menu. If that sounds cumbersome, you're probably not using your keyboard a lot.

“Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager.

Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!”

The idea sounds good. It's a bit of a cross between running apps from the command line and the point-and-click GUIs of today. There's one if though. Since you're essentially typing the name of the app you want to run or the file you want to open, you need to know what you are looking for. So in that sense, it's more of a companion to your start menu than a replacement.

Or perhaps it does more. I haven't ran it yet. || craeonics | comments

The sryan one has dug up a new, skinnable media player, KMPlayer, which probably stands for ‘Korean Media Player’. It supports most common video and audio formats, comes packed with various codecs and has various advanced features.

And the default skin has a built-in clock.

“The KMPlayer is all in one media player covering various formats such as VCD, DVD, AVI, MKV, Ogg, OGM, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, RealMedia, and QuickTime etc. It handles a wide range of subtitles and allows you to capture audio, video, and screenshots in many ways. The player includes almost all the essential free decoders required for playback. Furthermore, the external ones can be specified, so that KMP works optimally by the users' own customization.”

Best of all, it's been in active development since 2001, with fresh builds coming out, well, umm, quite often. The current version is 2.9.3.1214 and weighs in between four and twelve meg, depending on how complete you want it to be. || craeonics | comments

Stealing news from blizzle again, Punk Software's RocketDock is a dock, a combination of a task bar and an app launcher, similar in appearance and functionality to the one found in MacOS X. The changes in this beta are numerous and not really summarisable.

“RocketDock is a smoothly animated, alpha-blended application launcher that is similar to ObjectDock. RocketDock renders quickly like MobyDock, has the visual sharpness of Y'z Dock, and the stability that neither seem to possess. It is compatible with every dock skin format we are aware of. In fact, if you have a skin that doesn't load properly, send it to us, along with a screenshot of what it should look like and we'll see what we can do about integrating the format.”

There have been a number of quick beta releases in the past few days, the latest being beta 6, which you can grab in Punk's beta section. || craeonics | comments (9)