Programs are usually predictable things and you can tell how good or how bad one is from the early stages; however, sometimes applications take a giant leap and change significantly from one version to another. Such is the case of Relaunch, a tiny application for easily firing up all your applications, which, after just a few point releases, has turned from lead to gold.

What it does
Relaunch has a simple job: to remember what applications you were using, and launch them up for you. It takes snapshots of the currently running applications and saves them for later when you need to get back to your work, so you can be up and running with just a few clicks.

This is very handy not only for when you need to restart or after a power failure, but also when changing from working on one thing to another.

Working with it
Working with Relaunch has changed dramatically since the last review.

For general purpose restores, there is now an Auto Snapshot option, which can be turned on or off. Once on, the slider in the preferences lets you choose how often you want the snapshots to be taken. If anything unexpected happens, or you need to restart your computer, when you start Relaunch it will ask you whether you want to restore the auto snapshot.

For specific tasks, Relaunch now has the ability to save snapshots so that you can have several presets. This is great for when you want to use certain applications for certain tasks. Simply choose one of the snapshots you saved beforehand and then you can have all those programs opened up. It even lets you quit any existing applications that you might already have running, so that your machine does not get overloaded. The only misgiving I have found here is that - if you accidentally open the wrong preset - there is no cancel button in the dialogue that asks whether you want to close existing applications. While not a huge issue, it can be a problem if you are a messy clicker.

The icing on the cake
At the time of the previous Relaunch review, all it could do was launch applications. This version goes further than that and also remembers what documents were opened in those applications that it launches. This is insanely useful, because it allows you to actually take snapshots of the application itself and get back to it in exactly the state you left it. Whether because of restarts or because of task changes, using Relaunch means you have a minimal, if any, dead time when you get back to your work… it turns shutdowns and restarts into sleeps in terms of functionality, which is simply great.

The list of supported applications for this functionality may not be huge, but it has some of the most widely used ones, and the developer has eyes and ears open for requests and is working on expanding the list in the directions that are most desired by users.

Anything else?
In the last review, there was much to say about how things are done and how things should be done by Relaunch. Fortunately, the developer read the review and made the changes for the better and - now - Relaunch is a great little program.

On what is still missing, a cancel button for those of us who accidentally click on the wrong snap file when opening, and maybe for the snaps to be saved and hosed in a submenu within the Relaunch menu itself, might not go amiss. Also, in the case of automatic snapshots, some sort of visual feedback for those with longer delays and maybe a force command would be good so that you don't have to manually save a custom snap. However, these are very small issues that border the personal taste.

In terms of functionality, Relaunch has come far and, by the looks of it, will continue to go even further.

The Good

Handles custom snapshots for specific tasks and has an automated feature for general purposes, and can now even reopen the documents you had opened in many popular applications.

The Bad

The bad things have left Relaunch and have been replaced by good things. There is still room for improvements, but there are no more problems.

The Truth

Relaunch might not seem like a big deal, but in terms of what it can do for you it is huge. With the new options it takes a big slice out of any downtime you might have because of a restart or a change of task, and it is very affordable.

Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge: