I’ve just finished writing a small application for myself. It’s called Application Launcher and yes, it does launch applications…..

There were two reasons for writing this small app:

1. It takes forever to start my system since there are over 10 applications that are invoked at startup. What is ever more annoying all of them start at the same time! This leads to 1-2 minutes after system starts when I cannot use the system since everything is stating up.
2. I needed a sort of like a Startup utility for my USB key. When I put it in, I want to be able to start my email client, calendar, and RSS reader with least amount of clicks and of course I want to avoid the ‘Startup freeze’.

Welcome the application launcher.

Features:

• Launches applications (duh)
• After each launch there is a configurable delay before the next application launches
• When closing the application it tries to close all the started applications.
• When needed it uses relative path (which is great when you’re using USB key)
• If you want, you can have various configurations of what applications are starting even in one directory, simply rename the application and for each name it will have different configuration.

Here is the exe (ApplicationLauncher.zip (74.87 KB)) and the source code (ApplicationLauncher - source.zip (181.58 KB)) of the application. It has been written in .NET v2.0.