For those not familiar with Gnome Pie, this is an application launcher inspired by a World of Warcraft addon called OPie.

The app consists of multiple "pies", each being triggered by a keyboard shortcut or mouse button you set. Each pie has its own role: applications, bookmarks, main menu, multimedia (play/pause/previous/next), a pie that allows you to control the focused window (maximize, close, etc.) and so on.

If you use Lubuntu or another LXDE / Openbox based Linux distribution, you could give ADeskBar - a lightweight application launcher for Openbox -, a try. Even though it's especially designed for Openbox, ADeskbar also works great under Gnome or XFCE.

Kupfer v202 has been released today, finally adding AppIndicator (application indicator) support for Ubuntu users.

Kupfer v202 also adds an option to hide Kupfer when focus is lost - this is now enabled by default, as well as other minor tweaks and updated/new translations. Full changelog.

(Kupfer AppIndicator)

Skylight is an application launcher for Windows that can be used to launch application, search files, look up meanings of words in online dictionaries, search Google, YouTube etc. For those familiar with this type of applications, Skylight is very similar to Blaze or Gnome-Do.

After installing the application, a small icon will show up in your tray bar. You can run the application either by clicking the icon, or by a hot-key combination (the default one it Alt+Space). It works quite quickly, despite the fact it uses over 70.000K out of the Memory Usage.

Blaze is an application launcher, like Launchy or Gnome Do, for Windows only, but unlike thouse 2, Blaze is not a common application launcher. Yes, Blaze has the ability to index all your applications so you can easily launch them and it also allows to browse the web and the files on your computer.

But - and here is where the interesting part comes in - Blaze has the power to automate recurrent tasks. Here is how it works: Blaze 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.

This isn't something new, but I for one didn't know what the "Drawer" Gnome panel applet does so I thought I'd write about it.

If you're like me and want to have all the commonly used applications one click away, you probably have a lot of launchers on your Gnome panel(s) (I only have one which makes it even worse). But you can create drop-downs for these launchers, so that they take up a lot less space, and you don't even need to install anything. Here's how:

Executor is an application launcher similar to Launchy or Gnome-Do, but for Windows only.

To launch an application you have to type the first few letters and all matching applications will be displayed in a drop-down list. But that's not all: Executor can search the entire hard drive too. You can also assign shortcuts for applications, for instance you can assign the "ff" shortcut to Firefox so that when you enter ff, Firefox will be launched.

The program has a calculator for performing quick operations and supports several special commands like typing $M$ minimizes all windows, typing $APPS$ or simply “apps” displays a list of all running applications, $MUTE$ or “mute” mutes the speaker and so on.

Other useful features worth mentioning are:

• Skin Support
• Maintains history of run commands
• Supports wildcard search
• Full support for keyboard shortcuts
• Ability to access Windows context menu from within Executor
• Shortcuts to shutdown, hibernate, standby the computer
• Open URLs
• Override default file handling programs. Example: open PDF files in Adobe Reader even though the default PDF program is say Foxit Reader.

For the full list of features, visit Executor's homepage. You may also want to take a look at some more screenshots, here.

[via instantfundas]