Figure 1

Launchy is a really cool program that not only saves you valuable time, effort, and screen real estate, it also looks really cool.  it’s design is simply to launch a specified program simply by typing the name of it.

With Launchy, to launch an app, you press the desired keystroke (default -> ALT-SPACE) to launch the main Launchy menu (Figure 1) and simply start typing what you are looking for. as you can see from the image, by just typing the letters “ama” the suggestion to run the Amarok application has come up. Then when you press the enter key the selected application loads and the Launchy app goes back into idle mode.  When it is in idle mode it just hangs out in the background waiting to be launched again.  Out of sight, and saving all that valuable screen real estate that the Windows Start menu takes up!

So now you can hide that Windows bar, with confidence that you don’t have to rely on it so heavily!

Launchy is available from: http://www.launchy.net/

One of the biggest downfalls to having a netbook, or a small laptop computer is having a small amount of screen real estate.  Plus with it being a NETbook is does spend a lot of it’s time online online, so an ideal app would be one that solves these issues.

Well that’s one (of the many) great features of the Google Chrome web browser.  It has taken the idea of browser tabs and pushed them up into the title bar, plus made it’s address bar into a single bar and also included your nav buttons and your menu system.  Also, the status bar (at the bottom) is hidden, unless it is in use.

One of the other great features of this browser is that it is very very fast.  The initial program loading time is less than half the time it takes to load Mozilla Firefox, and the page loading time is faster than BOTH Firefox and Internet Explorer.  See this CNET article for more information.

It’s a fast and compact browser that is free to download and works better than it’s counterparts.  You can’t go wrong!

Google Chrome is available for download from: http://www.google.com/chrome

Google Docs

Google Docs is an online (Cloud) application that allows you to view edit and create documents, all through your browser. It shines in the fact that it is tightly woven into it’s other web based apps (gmail for example) which allows you to view a Word or Excel document right from your email. It is 100% free and is a great example of a free product that can be seen as MORE functional than it’s offline counterparts.

The only thing that you lose is a few of the more advanced desktop features.  Honeslty, though, the list of features that Google Docs offers is getting larger and larger by the day.  Google has set up a feature request page, if you do find something that you would like added to the app.  The link to is is here: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=featuresuggest

To get an account, all you have to do is go to: http://docs.google.com and either choose register, or login with your google/gmail account. (doesn’t everybody have one of those?).   From that point you will be on the main screen where you can open a saved document, create a new document, or simply upload an existing document.

So go out there and enjoy this free Cloud App.  Feel free to rate the app at the end of this article and leave any feeback in the comments section!