Archive for September, 2009

10
Sep
2009

7

Tools you need to use #4: Launchy

launchy_logo

One killer feature on the Mac that I desperately craved on Windows was the Spotlight feature. If you press Apple+Space it gives you an option to type some text. This text is then used to search through all the applications and files you have. It searches your email, music, dictionaries, basically everything on your machine. I use it as the primary way of opening applications and files on my MacBook.

spotlight

I still use a Windows XP machine at my work, which means I have to manually search through the Start Menu for whatever application I need. You can use the quick launch bar but that tends to get filled up fairly… well… quickly. Launchy solves this problem.

Launchy starts up when you log into Windows and offers you an on-demand dialog from a key combination. This dialog allows you to launch any application on you machine.

You simply hit Windows+Space (default is Alt+Space) to see a dialog, type ‘f’. and press return to load Firefox.

It remembers your previous choices and quickly becomes optimised for the way you think.

launchyfire

Windows Vista has a similar feature but it only works on whole words, which makes it pretty unusable. Luckily Launchy works on XP, Vista and Linux.

If you work in a job which requires you to use the Start Menu to launch applications, you can become much more productive (and happy) by using Launchy.

Other tools you need to use

04
Sep
2009

3

2 Months of Tech Blogging, and my Coding Dojo talk

My tech blog is 2 months old today. Interestingly, the biggest referrer to the site is Twitter, rather than Google. I’m quite happy with the articles I’ve put up so far and Google is starting to index some terms on the site quite highly.

Tech Blog posts roundup

Coding Dojo Talk at Techmeetup

I spoke at a Glasgow Techmeetup recently about Coding Dojos. It’s something I found very easy to talk about as I’ve been running one for over a year within JPMorgan. I’ve volunteered to host one for the .NET crowd in Scotland too.

The audience was different from usual as we had another presenter from the Channel 4 investment fund. So half the crowd was there to ask why he kept rejecting their ideas.

I think my talk went quite well as there were a lot of questions at the end. One bit of feedback I received was that I shouldn’t use my hands in a velociraptor style as it scares the crowd. I’ll look out for that in the future.

Here is the video of the talk.

Joe Wright talks about Coding Dojos from TechMeetup on Vimeo.