Speed Launch From Office Labs

The Office Labs site has released their first community prototype project: Speed Launch. (Community Prototypes are projects that Microsoft employees work on in their spare time.) Speed Launch is an application launcher, similar to Launchy, which I reviewed earlier here. 

With Speed Launch, you can quickly launch programs, documents, even frequently accessed websites. What makes Speed Launch different though, is that you can add items to it via drag-and-drop. For example, if you want to type “DVD” in order to launch Windows Media Player, you can just drag the Media Player icon to the Speed Launch app. Similar to how Launchy works (by pressing Alt+Spacebar), Speed Launch is accessed by typing Windows+C. Using some of its built-in functions, you can also use Speed Launch to do comparative web searches, Wikipedia searches, check weather, or check stocks, and more.

Speed Launch is available as a free download from here.