Photonic

Adam Knight — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 21:17:22 -0600

Working with a lot of photos to upload can be a pain, especially with any sort of web-based interface. No matter how well-designed the interface is, you’re still in a web browser and suffer from the limitations therein. The answer to effectively organizing and uploading tens, or even hundreds, of photos to Flickr is to use a desktop application specifically designed to help you accomplish this task. Enter Photonic.

Switchblade

Adam Knight — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 18:06:20 -0500

The Learning Application Switcher

Switchblade is an application switcher with a twist… it learns!

As you use Switchblade, it develops a list of your most popular and recently used applications and provides this information in a handy system-wide menu for instant access.

Switchblade gives you complete control over which applications appear in the menu, allowing you to designate applications as favorites, permanently hide others, and dynamically show and hide applications based on their Dock presence or other criteria.

Version 1.0.1 addresses several cumulative memory leaks and is an advised upgrade.

A Better Switcher

We built Switchblade after realizing that the Dock becomes less and less useful the more and more icons you add to it. We found that it greatly improved our productivity to keep only the absolute most commonly used applications in the dock, relying on Switchblade to access virtually everything else.

Switchblade also allows you to exclude items based on how many times they’ve been launched, whether they exist in your Dock, and whether currently open, as well as allowing you to force specific applications to permanently hide or show themselves. Switchblade doesn’t replace your dock, it makes it better by leaving valuable Dock space for the applications that truly need it, and putting the rest in an easily accessible location.

Most other applications used for switching applications have grown over time, becoming monsters of applications that attempt to be a Swiss army knife to the problem, and a dozen others. Switchblade does one common task, and does it well.

Activate the menu with a universal hot key of your choosing and start typing. As you type, the menu narrows your choice down until just a key press opens or activates your application. It’s like Spotlight, only it actually is fast.

Customize, Organize

Switchblade lets you customize the way the menu looks in a wide variety of ways, offering sections for popular applications, recent applications, and currently-open applications. There are settings for how large the icons are to how many items are in each section. Switchblade looks different for every user because every user needs something different from Switchblade. It’s there to help.

Requirements