Stardock’s Launch8 makes the Start screen more useful

Published on October 25, 2013 By Frogboy In Personal Computing

Stardock’s Launch8 is a program that should, imo, have been part of Windows 8 in the first place. On every other mobile device you have some sort of persistent quick launch bar that makes it easy to get to the things you use all the time.

Not only does Launch8 had this persistent, easy to use launcher to the bottom of the Windows 8 Start screen, it integrates the usability features first introduced into Windows 7 such as Jump-lists (Which should matter more than ever on a touch device!).

Launch8, like Start8, ModernMix, Decor8, WindowBlinds, Fences, etc. are all part of Stardock’s premiere desktop enhancement suite, Object Desktop.

To learn more about Launch8 go to www.stardock.com/products/launch8

Comments

moshi

on Oct 25, 2013

personally i would need more padding between the icons, would i want to use this on 10 inch or smaller touch screen.

the jumplist menus look unusable (and i have small fingers). makes me guess you Surface users use the stylus or a mouse most of the time.

i like the idea, but to be honest this looks a little premature. a method to "lock" one or more columns or rows would be way nicer.

Uvah

on Oct 26, 2013

On Win8 I saw that you can remove tiles from the start page. Put the ones in Launch 8 that you want and delete those tiles keeping only the ones not in the launcher.

Frogboy

on Oct 26, 2013

That's a good point. You could use launch8 as your main launcher and the start screen for overflow.

c242

on Oct 28, 2013

Will Launch8 be able to use other than the standard app icons in further versions ? I have not been able to change any icons in there.

Other than that I like it on my Asus VivoTab.

Frogboy

on Oct 28, 2013

c242

reply 4

Will Launch8 be able to use other than the standard app icons in further versions ? I have not been able to change any icons in there.

Probably. Depends on sales.

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