A Review Of Application Launcher Dashboard Widgets - Part 2
In Part 1 of this three part review of "Application Launching Dashboard Widgets" I went over DashDock, a pretty handy little widget that can make your life a bit easier when it comes to hiding your lesser used applications in a handier place than the Application Folder. In this part I'm going to go over AppButton, a much un-dock-like widget that can do the exact same thing that DashDock does in a completely different way.
AppButton is made by the same people, tacowidgets, that made Utility Button. A widget that does a similar thing but is focused on your system utility programs, like Activity Monitor, Network Utility etc. The basic design concept is the same as well, going on the "less is more" mentality, it is, as it states, a button.
When you first open AppButton you are greeted with said button. Pressing on it doesn't do anything, yet. It simply brings up an empty menu. Upon flipping the widget over you find a host of things and are at first rather confused as to what is going on. There is a help button that goes over the basics, but after you've absorbed the basic premise you can figure out what you are supposed to do. (I should also add that you'll see a message about the widget being in Beta stage if you download it anytime soon.)
Essentially, what you do is enter the name of the application you'd like to add to the menu in the front of the widget into the search bar. If the widget finds any matches it lists them (it finds both applications and widgets). From the list you select the one you'd like to add to the list and it is added. You delete and traverse the menu with the arrow and "-" buttons.
Once you've set up your list of applications/widgets that you want to have easy access to you flip the widget over (awkwardly considering the difference in size between the front and back) and once again you've got the basic blue button, (unless you change the color which is an option on the back, there are 6 in total), but now when you click on it you get a drop down menu with all your chosen applications. Selecting one shuts Dashboard and launches it. Or rather should launch it.
This is a Beta release used for testing so it's hard to really say anything critical about it. They tell you themselves on the back of the widget that they are still working on it so some bugs can be expected. There is a minor one with names appearing twice during the search phase, and a major with certain applications not launching. (Taco HTML and Konfabulator for example.) No doubt these small issues will be fixed in the final release. But, for the most part the widget works without any major problems.
As for the design, I like it. The back could be cleaned up a bit, but overall it's quite a good thing this "less is more". It takes up quite a small amount of space and yet does exactly what much larger widgets do. I could easily just put every application I have on the list and never have to open the Applications Folder again. Honestly, I'm quite tempted to.
Functionality. It works quite well. The search function is spot on most of the time and the adding of applications is pretty straight forward. Selecting an application to launch from the list is simple and intuitive. Can it do anything besides launch applications? Well, it can launch widgets. Can you have multiple versions with separate lists? No, but why would you want to? Does it remember your preferences? Yes.
Overall I really like this thing. I was kind of skeptical at first but when you stop and think about it AppButton is a really smart idea. It may not be as Apple aesthetic as the other "dock-like" widgets but it makes up for that with it's simplicity. You already have one dock and you want to get things out of it, so maybe having another one isn't the best solution. But we'll see when we take a look at Mondo Dock in Part 3.
Design: 4
Functionality: 5
Dock Problem Solving: 5
K. Panda
