Enso Launcher now free
About a year ago we first discussed an intriguing but flawed program launcher called Enso. The big knocks against it in our review were that it had a large memory footprint, and that it was a commercial application competing against a number of very good free launchers. For some people, memory footprint will continue to be an issue. However, memory continues to drop in price, and it's not uncommon to be running 2 to 4 GB of system RAM today. If you're in that situation, does an application eating up 45 MB of RAM really matter that much?
If price was your main reason for not trying Enso Launcher (or for not sticking with it), it's your lucky day. The folks at Humanized have decided to make Enso a free product.
There's no doubt that Enso is a beautiful application launcher, and with a price tag of free it becomes quite compelling. We'd still like to see them change the syntax so that instead of verb-subject (i.e. Go Firefox) it was structured subject-verb more like Quicksliver on the Mac. That's really a minor quibble though. If you value style as much as functionality on your PC, Enso Launcher is certainly worth a second look.












Comments
4
Subscribe to commentstheplaymaker62Feb 10th 2008 9:49PM
Thought I'd let you guy's know that the Beta of Enso Launcher found here ( http://www.humanized.com/enso/beta/enso-20-launcher-prototype ) answers alot of the problems that users had addressed to them. You can now control what key it uses to open the program (i'm using the windows key now) and allows a stick option as opposed to the sometimes tedious holding down the caps lock button. Finally, they changed the way programs are opened by allowing the user to just type "o" and then type in the command... I'm a longtime user of Launchy (amazing program) but I have to say, if this prototype is a sign of things to come... then Launchy is gonna finally be given a run for its money. My suggestion: Download the beta
DavidONEFeb 10th 2008 11:56PM
"... instead of verb-subject (i.e. Go Firefox) it was structured subject-verb ... . That's really a minor quibble though."
Not that minor. Having to type 'go' (or 'o') every time I launch something is big enough for me to not even consider a test drive. By comparison, Launchy does everything I need in a minimal and effective way - I type 'fi' and open Firefox, 'ph' and I open Photoshop.
Also, Enso is Windows only. Launchy will soon run on Linux. That's a big sell to the growing number stampeding away from MS.
Also, also, Humanized offer no forum to interact with other users. That's worth more than too many companies realise.
soniiicFeb 11th 2008 6:22AM
launchy doesn't have the same sticky key setup. i like holding down caps lock to activate it, yet with Launchy it was crap as hell cos i had to press [Ctrl + Space] and it would pop up but then if i clicked away it would still be moved to the back of the window arrangement and still open! so that means next time i press [Ctrl + Space] it would close the already opened Launchy (that i can't see)! grr
kingkool68Feb 11th 2008 11:43AM
Slickrun for life -> http://www.bayden.com/SlickRun/