Sparky

The concept of revolutionizing your digital lives by using a program or tool has been around for a long time – to-do lists, stats display, program launchers, toolbars, thumbnails, eye-candy adders and so on, to name a few. Having used at least one from all of these or in most cases all possible of these, I do have a little experience in these matters. When we were asked to do a project using C, I hit upon this idea of creating my own program launcher, the class of programs which had impressed me the most in these.

Check out Sparky at

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/Sparky

QUICK START GUIDE

Start the program Sparky.

You should see a lightning icon in your system tray.

Now if you this is your first-run or you want sparky to detect new programs, RIGHT-CLICK on the tray icon and select RESCAN CATALOG

You should see a cmd window opening and flickering in your computer.

Press ALT+SPACE to bring up the Sparky window.

Ta-da ! Sparky is ready type the name of the program you want to launch and feel the unleashed power of your keyboard.

WHAT IS A PROGRAM LAUNCHER?

A program launcher is simply a tool which is used to launch programs. In an ideal world, the number of menu items in our start menu, should be very limited. But just like everything in this world, the start menu too becomes cluttered and full of programs which you neither want to uninstall or create a desktop shortcut, programs like that video converter, which you know you will suddenly need when you are planning a long trip and need a VCD or that old console game which you will still play with your sister, when she's bored. As a result of all these, you have a nearly entire screen covering Start menu items.

And when you hit upon a solution of creating desktop shortcuts to ever program you think you will need, once again you end up fighting for valuable screen real estate. Also, those icons do make the wallpaper you have chosen after browsing through so much of 'top 10 cool wallpapers for your desktop' seem uncool.

In such a case, comes along a program launcher which will help you to launch any program that you have in mind. This is a program launcher ( yeah, I already said it is). And sparky is my chosen tool of the trade.

HOW TO USE SPARKY

Ok, so much for the build up, but how does one use a program launcher, like Sparky.

Using Sparky is very simple, say you have to launch a program say Notepad. All you got to do is type the name of the program you wish to launch in the space provided. Yeah! It's that simple. Type and thy shall be rewarded.

Now as you type each letter in the box, you should see a list displaying the top 4 programs starting with those letters. If you see the program you wish to launch, simply press the Up and Down keys to select the program of our choice. Press that key, that one key – yeah yeah, it's ENTER and ta-da your program should start immediately ( unless it's something bloaty like Photoshop, but,hey that aint; my fault).

HOW DOES SPARKY WORK ?

Well, so much so for running Sparky. How does it actually work ?

Sparky mainly searches your Computer for any .lnk files. So, if you want Sparky to recognise something you want just create a shortcut and select Rescan catalog.

Then Sparky, uses C to access the library and search for any files matching the same name. When you press ENTER, Sparky executes the link using Command Promt.

The residential program is actually a compiled Auto Hotkey script . I have also included the script in the

Sparky (atleast upto 0.3 is full written in C and uses just C). Sparky runs only when you call it using the shortcut keys. So, even if it takes up memory, its only for the launch.