Winlaunch 4.0 Beta 2

Having a keyboard with more than a hundred keys on it, wouldn't it make sense to make the most of them? With Winlaunch now you can assign your own customizable keyboard shortcuts to a wide array of different actions.

After installing the program, you're presented with a clear, simple interface where you can start adding shortcuts straight away. Winlaunch includes a wizard-like interface that makes it very easy: select the action you want to perform, set the variables and assign a given shortcut to it. That's all!

You can choose between launching an application, opening a file or folder, starting an e-mail message, opening a webpage, executing a certain command or even inserting a predefined text string. As for key combinations there are also many to choose from, including modifiers such as Ctrl, Alt, Shift or the Win key.

I especially liked the so called "Exceptions", which enable you to disable hotkeys under certain circumstances so that they don't overrun other predefined shortcuts. This means that, for example, if you use Ctrl+T to open the Twitter website, you can disable that combination when working in Photoshop so that you can properly use the Transformation tool shortcut, which is also Ctrl+T.

On the downside, I missed having some kind of easy reminder to review all the shortcuts I had created without having to open the program's interface. Thus it'll be easier to learn all combinations by heart from the very beginning.

With Winlaunch you'll be able to perform a wide variety of actions in Windows just by using keyboard shortcuts, though it'll require some effort from you to learn them all.