Before we get into the review - a quick history lesson. LauncherX was first developed by Bozidar Benc and soon became one of the premier launcher applications for the Palm OS. Even after the unfortunate death of the developer, the LauncherX user community kept going strong (launcherxplanet.com is an excellent example). Unfortunately, due to the lack of active development, the community stopped growing.

Until recently, LauncherX was still without a developer; leaving the program without the innovation necessary to continue to compete with other Palm OS Launchers. mytreo.net’s 5-star developer, Jeff Gibson, changed all that when he took over development of the program. With only a few adjustments specifically designed to make LauncherX more compatible with newer Palm devices, he released LauncherX v1.2. While this review will mainly focus on this release, it is important to note that LauncherX v2.0 will be released in the near future.

LauncherX is essentially a launcher designed with the ease-of-use of the Palm OS default launcher in mind; hence the similar look and feel. However, LauncherX is much more than just a pretty new face for your Palm.

LauncherX adds functionality, most notably through its tabs at the top of the screen. These are similar to the Categories that the Palm OS Launcher has, except they are much more accessible and intuitive to use. LauncherX provides not only excellent 5-way navigator support, but it also gives users the ability to drag and drop icons into the desired category tabs.

All you have to do is use the Right/Left buttons on your 5-way to access your tabs. This allows you to break your applications into groups. Home, Office, System Utilities, Games; you can even drag and drop programs into “hidden” tabs (goodbye Obfuscate!), and rename programs (goodbye ChangeMe!). Everything is made easier because of the drag-and-drop functionality.

Want to beam a file? Drag the program icon to the Beam icon at the bottom of the screen (these icons are known as Gadgets) and it will start the beaming process. Want to send an application to your expansion card? Simply drag the program icon to the Card icon. In addition to all this, LauncherX provides complete support for applications that reside on the expansion card.

In this picture, you can see the small blue card next to the program icon that lets you know the application resides on the expansion card. LauncherX allows you to take these icons and move them around just as if they were in the RAM memory of your phone! This feature does wonders with respect to integrating the user’s expansion card more completely with the rest of the Treo, as the standard Palm Launcher makes accessing applications on the card a bit of a chore sometimes.

LauncherX comes with a completely functional 15-day demo, and it really is worth at least checking out, especially with v2.0 so close to release. And, as with the rest of Jeff Gibson’s software, LauncherX comes with standard (manual) registration, along with his innovative SMS registration. It also comes with excellent technical and customer support from Jeff and the GoTreo Software team.

Related Links

Download LauncherX.

Purchase LauncherX from mytreo.net/store.

Visit GoTreo Software’s forum on mytreo.net.

Filed under: Software reviews