Enso Launcher - the keyboard launcher I wanted to love

Filed under: Design, Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Microsoft, Shareware

Enso Launcher - the keyboard launcher I wanted to love

by Jason Clarke Feb 25th 2007

Enso Launcher is YAKAL (yet another keyboard application launcher) from Humanized. Where Enso sets itself apart is in the fact that the application puts a big focus on design and staying out of your way. In fact, Enso Launcher doesn't have a window, but instead layers itself over top of what you're currently doing, allowing you to stay in context.

I sat on this review for a long time because I have somewhat mixed feelings about Enso Launcher. I really wanted to love it, but the more I used it, the more its limitations became apparent.

For example, it does not allow the user to choose a key combination that's ergonomic and comfortable for them to use; instead you must press and hold the Caps Lock key and start typing the name of the application you would like to launch. With a bit of practice, this turns out to be not all that hard, but still enforces a strange awkwardness on users that seems like an odd choice for a product that seems to take itself very seriously with respect to design. This also makes the assumption that the user does not intend to use the actual Caps Lock key. That's a pretty big assumption; I'm not even a developer, and I still find instances where it is useful to have a working Caps Lock key.

Enso does have a couple of interesting tricks up it's sleeve that other launcher's don't. It allows you to jump from any application right into a specific open tab in Firefox, by naming the page by it's title. I absolutely fell in love with this feature, until it became clear that it was flaky on my system; it seemed to fail to recognize that the tab I was requesting actually existed. I'm sure that's a quirk of my system, but in the end it didn't "just work".

Enso also allows you to manipulate windows (maximizing, restoring, minimizing, etc) through text commands. This is a slick feature, and one I wish all keyboard launchers would emulate.

I could probably overlook the Caps Lock design mistake if it wasn't for Enso breaking my golden rule of Windows software: "don't be bloated." Unfortunately, in my testing Enso Launcher consumed in the neighborhood of 45 MB of system RAM. While that doesn't seem like a particularly significant amount, for comparison Firefox consumes just over double that with 20 tabs open on my system, and my two other favorite keyboard launchers, Launchy and Colibri consume 15 MB and 11 MB respectively. Of course Launchy and Colibri, while attractive enough, don't hold a candle to Enso's graphical design quality. Too bad the rest of the application wasn't put together as well.

The final nail in Enso's coffin is simply price; while I don't mind paying for good software, I can't pay $19.95 for software that I find merely equal to a free alternative, in the balance of things.

Tags: Colibri, Enso Launcher, EnsoLauncher, keyboard launcher, KeyboardLauncher, Launchy

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Joker said 9:42AM on 2-25-2007

I came to your same conclusion.

I also became annoyed that it always made me completely type the action word. For example, I always had to type the word "open" completely before I could start with the application name.

Another annoyance was that it didn't "learn". It always came up with the same sorted list of choices.

It was pretty though

R. Francis Smith said 2:45PM on 2-25-2007

You know, it's weird -- I never see anyone talk about Find and Run Robot off the DonationCoder website, and yet for me it's blown the other Windows Quicksilvery things out of the water consistently. The most recent updates to it have increased its performance substantially and it's just amazingly flexible (and easy on the graphics processing, but not ugly as such.)

I can't operate without FRR anymore -- it goes on every Windows machine I have to use.

Random

Ron said 11:58AM on 2-26-2007

I was a FRR user for over a year, but I ended up switching to Launchy. FRR is nagware--you have to type in a new registration key periodically, which is essentially a mechanism to beg you for donations (boo!) Launchy on the other hand will occasionally open a browser window to their donation page--far less obtrusive. Add to the the fact that Launchy is far more performant and supports plugins (including my favorite--it allows you to launch your firefox keyword searches) and it's an easy decision for me.

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