14 DAY TRIAL // Many times I have seen desktops packed with shortcuts. A friend of mine was even complaining he had no space on the desktop anymore and that he needed to buy a new monitor. I rather keep my shortcuts in Start>Programs and in Total Commander. Due to the media keyboards on the market I can assign favorites and launch them from my keyboard. Quicklaunch is also a good place to keep some programs.
Also, there are computer users that would save absolutely everything on the desktop. Games, text documents, MP3s, downloaded files etc., they are all at home on the desktop. Not a very good idea as if the system partition gets infected or damaged then all your desktop data will be lost.
A solution is saving your other files on the other volumes of the hard disk and keeping them organized in folders and directories. Another way is getting a program launcher that can solve the problem ASAP. A very good application launcher is $39.95. It will allow you to simply type a command (no matter of the application you have opened) and launch a program apparently out of nowhere.
My Favorites Pro is designed to orderly keep at hand the shortcuts of your programs. Once you have installed and "loaded" the application with shortcuts, you should be able to clean your desktop and stop looking for the shortcut you need. The $9.95 solution comes from Dionel de la Cruz and the only limitation of the evaluation version is that you can only add three shortcuts for each category. Other than this, you can use the software as long as you want.
The interface will not pose any problems no matter your skills in computer using. The interface could not be simpler to manage. The categories are listed on the right side of the application window, at the top. There are eight categories so a simple math tells that the user can add 24 shortcuts in the trial version. The full version however will unlock this restriction and will allow users to add as much as 36 shortcuts per category. That means that the software supports storing a maximum number of 288 shortcuts. That is a lot indeed.
The categories available allow users to keep at hand launching of programs belonging to the field of the Internet (web browsers, IP finders, download managers, P2P etc.), Games, Office (text documents, Excel documents, PowerPoint presentation, PDFs etc.), System (defragmenters, duplicate finders, registry cleaners, disk optimizers etc.), Media (video/audio players, multimedia centers, image viewers or editors etc.), Sound (sound card, audio editors etc.), Workshop and Others.
These boxes will allow keeping every shortcut in order and in place. The desktop space will be freed and you will no longer spend time looking for a certain shortcut.
The category names are just orienting and the user can change the names by simply right clicking on the category tab and making the modification. Adding shortcuts is easy and the context menu displayed at right clicking permits adding, deleting or renaming the shortcuts. Find Target option will get you to the storing folder of the shortcut. Generally all the .exe files are stored in the Program files folder and you can create a shortcut from every executable you have on your computer. The only thing is to get the right shortcut (not the kit of the software, but the .exe of the installed application).
Going into the Help menu (lower left part of the application window) will open the License window (I do not know why it is called License as there are three tabs available and two of them are for providing help and some scanty configuration options). The most important tab available is Options, which lets the user configure My Favorite Pro to start with Windows and run minimized.
The Good
My Favorite Pro is extremely easy to use and providing the organizing means can only make your software launching faster and easier. The flexibility offered by allowing users rename both shortcuts as well as categories recommends it to newbies.
You can keep all the shortcuts in one place and keep your desktop clean.
The Bad
The price is high enough considering the alternatives you can use. However, 288 shortcuts storage for you is a lot and I guess the compromise is pretty well balanced.
Commands should be introduced with feature versions.
The Truth
Very good for beginner users. Advanced computer users may see it as futile and would rather choose a more expensive and advanced application which allows launching the applications based on commands.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
