Little nice tool for Vista users I?ve decided to share a little tool that I wrote on a whim a week or two ago for Vista. This is a personal project of mine, not related to MS in any way. Users of WDS on XP may recall the ?Deskbar Shortcuts? functionality that allows you to create little aliases between words or characters with commands and searches. For example, you could set up the Deskbar so that you could type ?g Stuff? to search for the work ?Stuff? on Google. You could also launch programs, run scripts with parameters, and more. Windows Vista replaced the Deskbar with Instant Search built-in to the Start menu, which is totally awesome. Unfortunately, it lacks all of that fun shortcut functionality that the Deskbar had. Unless you have my tool, which for the time being I?m calling Start++. I just uploaded Start++ 0.4. The music gadget that I showed before isn?t in there yet, but the picture gadget is. The focus of this release is to get some testing on the new start menu hooking mechanism - so I?d appreciate your feedback on how that works! What´s new:
Start++ now runs in the system tray to provide better Start Menu hooking, including custom Start Menu UI (?Start Gadgets?). Picture Gadget is the first built-in Start Gadget. Eventually this will be extensible. New Options tab with three options Disable running in the background (provides the same functionality as previous versions). Disable command line integration (feature request) Disable Start Menu commands for when Start++ isn?t running Bug fixes, including a fix for users with spaces in their user names. Download