My apologies for the blog being kind of silent for the last 9 months or so. I’ve had work up to my eyes and there just wasn’t a whole lot of time to post anything.
Lots of stuff have happened since the 3.0.1 release of Salling Clicker. A number of smartphones models based on Symbian 9+ have been released (or announced) by Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola(!). The Broadcom folks appear to have lost their grip on the Bluetooth stack market for Windows (for better or for worse—as a result we’ve seen the rise of stacks from Toshiba and IVT/BlueSoleil). An increasing number of phones now come with built in WiFi capabilities. Windows Vista was finally released and Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” and Windows Mobile 6 appear to be just around the corner.
These are all things that need to be addressed in an application like Salling Clicker. In addition, there are features to add. Lots of work but I have a feeling something might be ready for release pretty soon now…
Launching and switching between applications are two very common activities when using Windows. Keyboard aficionados will naturally seek to minimize the work involved in such common tasks. For launching applications, Windows provides the (accessed from the keyboard via the Windows key or Ctrl+Esc), the toolbar (Win+Tab, Tab), (Win+D), and the Run dialog (Win+R). For managing running programs, Windows provides the (Win+Tab) and Alt+Tab window. Other than a few innovations in the Start Menu, such as recent and pinned items and highlighting of recently installed programs, little changed in these features between Windows 95 and Windows 2003. They aren’t the most robust implementations:
The Start Menu tends to end up as a cluttered, unordered mess that nobody wants to waste their time wading through. The recent/pinned items help, but only in some circumstances.
The Alt+Tab window only supports navigating one item at a time via Alt+Tab or Alt+Shift+Tab.
Quick Launch and the Taskbar are not really very quick for keyboard fanatics.
The Run Dialog isn’t resizable, only remembers the last 30 items entered, and doesn’t show icons.
Each feature is isolated, requiring extra thought on the user’s part to decide/remember which keystroke or place to look for each operation.
Windows did make some improvements in this area, but not enough to get very excited about.
The Start Menu provides a search capability, which is a big improvement, but it is fairly limited compared to other implementations (searches only match on contiguously typed characters, so ‘internet’ or ‘explore’ can be used to find Internet Explorer, but not ‘ie’ or ‘iexp’; there is no memory of abbreviations to your choice of a match [for instance, to ensure that ‘oe’ always matches Outlook Express after you choose it even if something else matched first initially], etc.).
Alt+Tab shows thumbnails and can be navigated via arrows keys and Home/End, but it still doesn’t provide a way to group related windows.
The flashy, but not very useful, Flip 3D (Win+Tab) has been added (taking away quick keyboard access to the Taskbar).
Each feature is still separate, rather than being unified into a more intuitive design.
These limitations have, of course, spawned a whole cottage industry of products that attempt to improve on various aspects of launching and switching between applications. These days, there are literally dozens of such applications available that take various approaches to solving the problem. I’ve evaluated and used many of them in my ongoing quest for the ultimate in application launching and task switching, and I’ll be reviewing some in future blog posts.
In my opinion, one of the biggest problems is that there are simply too many ways to launch and switch between programs. These features need to be unified. You shouldn’t have to use Quick Launch or the desktop for common applications but then hunt through the Start Menu for less common programs, or distinguish between launching a program vs. switching to an already-running application, etc. Surprisingly, with all of the programs that are trying to fill this void, nobody has yet managed to combine these capabilities into a single, intuitive interface.
