Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Open Source
Could open source Blaze be the best Windows application launcher ever?
by Lee Mathews Sep 24th 2009 at 2:00PM
For starters, it's smart enough to find what you're looking for even if you should happen to stumble over your keys a bit (e.g. the butchered Photoshop entry above). Lurking behind the scenes is a powerful automation handling system and plugin support (skin support is coming soon).
The automator watches silently in the background, waiting to observe you performing repetitive tasks. When it spots something, Blaze will alert you and offer to create an action to handle the task next time. On the project page, the author demonstrates this functionality by renaming a directory full of photos. Blaze can also record macros -- so you can just press record, start doing what you need to do, and presto! You've got a new action.
Blaze ships with .dll plugins to provide several handy functions, like creating emails, performing calculations, index the ID3 tags of your MP3s, and more.
I can see myself enjoying Blaze on my netbook even without all the advanced functions. Since my typing isn't quite as accurate on the scaled-down keys, it's nice to know that Blaze will still be able to launch apps even if I hit a few wrong keys here or there.
edit: forgot to mention, .NET 3.5 is required - sorry, running Windows 7 you sometimes forget that it's still an additional download for some!
[via MakeUseOf]
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Peter said 5:55PM on 9-24-2009
looks interesting, it seems to have some capabilities that could be quite useful.
i am wondering how it would stack up against launchy (mentioned) or FARR (http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun/index.html) however.
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hasenj said 9:32PM on 9-24-2009
Hmm, the monitoring and suggestion feature sounds like it can be annoying and could slow down the computer.
It reminds me of clippy, actually.
http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/files/articles/clippy.jpg
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