Coming soon: Start any program in the Start Menu with a few keystrokes
I’m working on a project which uses JShortcut along with JDIC IconService, JDIC FileTypes, and Glazed Lists to allow you to quickly search through the programs in your Start Menu.
Here’s a screenshot:
There are lots of programs that do this, but they are all shareware, or for other operating systems, so I’m writing my own.
This is a brand new project but the basic search functionality is there, as you can see in the screenshot. Some icons don’t show up because of some JDIC bugs, which will hopefully be fixed soon.
I have a bunch of plans for this project, including:
- Create JDIC subproject out of JShortcut, or integrate it into JDIC FileTypes
- Add Linux and OSX support
It looks like I’m going to have to write my own library with JNI for setting global (desktop-wide) hotkeys, as well as to watch a folder for changes.
I can’t think of a name for this project; any suggestions would be great, just post a comment.
I will create a java.net page for this project as soon as I find a name I like.
April 28th, 2005 at 10:46 am
I’m the Glazed Lists guy so I’m naturally excited about your project. But there’s one thing on your screenshot that bothers me - the Refresh button! It would be oh-so-much-cooler if your program updated itself automatically.
Unfortunately, implementing a fix for this is fairly complicated. Your options aren’t pleasant:
- poll continuously (ugly), or
- develop JNI services that use the native notification service (hard & error-prone)
As is, you’re probably better off with the “Refesh” button. But I’m going to keep that problem in mind when I’m looking for topics for the Glazed Lists magazine!
April 28th, 2005 at 12:47 pm
I started this project yesterday, and that screenshot is only after an hour or two of work. I don’t plan to keep the Refresh button. I plan to use JNI to watch for folder changes.
I want to say, Glazed Lists is totally awesome, I wish I had known about it earlier. I use it on exactly two lines of code, and I get all that functionality, from just creating a sorted list and a text field filter list.
April 28th, 2005 at 1:58 pm
A JNI library for folder updates would be very valuable in a lot of places througout the JDK. It could even be integrated into a file chooser! If it will be open source, please writing a general API - I’m sure it would be very welcome in JDIC.
April 28th, 2005 at 6:19 pm
I would expect the global hotkey library would also be an excellent candidate for JDIC.
Cheers
April 28th, 2005 at 10:56 pm
Hi, I’m working on JDIC, and I like the idea !!! JDIC provides such pieces of APIs, but there is nothing integrated. I’d very much like help set it up under JDIC. From my side, I’ll try to fix those bugs with JDIC Filetypes.
The setting global (desktop-wide) hotkeys and watching a folder for change features were both requested from JDIC before;
https://jdic.dev.java.net/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=212
So, it would be great to incubator them in JDIC. They can serve this project, but can also server many other applications.
On the other hand, I’ll contact JShortcut to see if it’s possible to integrate it in JDIC somehow.
And, I’d suggest we propose such ideas in JDIC forum:
http://www.javadesktop.org/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=52
the central place for such proposals. : )