Do you have a tricked-out quick launch bar on your taskbar? The quick launch bar has its benefits and drawbacks, but it can certainly make it easier to launch your most often-used applications with the click of a mouse. Although I still prefer the speed of a text-based launcher, there are days when I want to do everything with my mouse and for that I like having a nicely organized quick launch toolbar.

But the quick launch toolbar is extremely simple, and definitely has limitations. If you want to supercharge your quick launch toolbar, consider running True Launch Bar, which is like quick launch on steroids.

Using True Launch Bar you can easily organize your quick launch icons into a menu system, using icons, text, or both. In fact, it uses the same directory structure as the quick launch bar, so upon installing it will immediately show you what you already had there. You can of course configure quick launch menus using a folder structure under your quick launch folder, but using True Launch bar the process is made much easier, and you're able to customize the look and feel of your menus in a way that Windows doesn't allow you to do by itself.

True Launch Bar is also extensible, and has a wide range of available plugins to allow you to show pertinent system information in your taskbar.

True Launch bar is shareware with a 30-day trial period. It costs US$19.90 to purchase.

[Update] As John points out in the comments, there's a free version called Free Launch Bar that I totally missed. It has many of the features described above, and is completely free. Thanks John!

Quciksilver, the popular, perpetually in googlebeta "unified, extensible interface" for OS X has been updated to β51. If you haven't seen the little update screen yet, you will soon. The update is mostly bugfixes for the core plugins; It looks like all of them got overhauled. More interesting is the release note that build 3800, a.k.a. β51, is "Final Tweaks," capital F, capital T. Does that mean the next version will be a release? I hope so. The developers have put a lot of work--3800 builds and counting--into this little gem and, while I've enjoyed the free downloads, they deserve to make a little money off it.

For those of you who aren't sure what a unified, extensible interface is, it's difficult to explain. In it's most basic form, it provides keyboard shortcuts for application launching. You hit CTRL-Space at any time, type the first few letters of an application name, and it launches. With the core plug-ins, it can be tweaked to use to also find files through spotlight, mail, Address Book contacts, and even iPhoto photos. That's pretty powerful. The really nifty part, though, is the "extensible" bit. Authors can write plugins for virtually anything, allowing you to tie almost anything, from system events to Automator actions to keystrokes and other triggers to control everything from your destop picture to your GMail. Think of it as Mission Control for your Mac.

It seems like this series of application launchers just won't stop. In the comments for our post about the application launcher Colibri, Taylor mentions yet another launcher called, appropriately, Launchy. Being a sucker for this type of application, I couldn't wait to give it a try.

Launchy is a very slick application launcher. It sports a Vista-inspired theme complete with see-through glass edges, and is extremely small and fast. By default it only indexes your Start menu, however it can be manually configured to index any folder you like, and can even be told which file extensions to index.

If you've tried some of the other launchers we've recommended here but found them not quite your cup of tea, give Launchy a try.

We recently went through a phase of showing a number of different application launchers. I thought we were done with that, at least for awhile, until DownloadSquad reader Martin submitted this utility through our tip form. Dubbed simply (and accurately) Hotkeys, this utility is pretty fantastic.

Like most hotkey configuration utilities, Hotkeys allows the user to setup specific key combinations to launch applications, switch between open instances of a running application, control volume (via an add-on) and even remap your Caps Lock key to be a Windows key. But where Hotkeys shines is in how it is configured; setting up a new hotkey is a matter of displaying the on-screen keyboard, and dragging and dropping a shortcut to the key you would like to use to launch it. This in and of itself is pretty great, but they've taken this visual aspect a step further.

One of the reasons most people don't bother to learn hotkeys is that they simply can't remember them long enough to stick into their long-term memory. Hotkeys helps you out with this by simply showing the on-screen keyboard with icons representing each configured hotkey when the user holds down the Windows key for more than 3 seconds. In practice what this means is that when you know the key combination you need, Hotkeys stays out of your way and is very fast. But when you realize you can't remember the key combination, by the time you've decided you need to look for another way to launch the application, the on-screen keyboard has popped up showing you what you needed to know.

Did I mention that the visuals are very appealing? Hotkeys is a product of qliner software, who have decided to release Hotkeys as an open-source project.

Well, it looks like it's Application Launcher week here at Download Squad! Reader Angel points us to yet another text-based application launcher, this one titled Find and Run Robot by Donation Coder. She quite rightly points out that in its default configuration, it's not particularly sexy, but it does include a few very slick skins to spruce things up.

SlickRun is my newest favorite utility. It's a very small and simple application launcher, but packs some pretty powerful features into it's tiny self. Along with allowing you to assign keywords to applications and launch them, you can quickly navigate to both local folders on your filesystem as well as websites. Simply hit the SlickRun hotkey combination, type your destination and press Enter, and whammo - you're there. SlickRun also contains a very useful Jot application for taking notes. It automatically saves so you don't need to remember to, will accept any text that is dragged and dropped onto it, and timestamps entries to make finding them again easier. It also contains a Find function.