Todos: A Simply Beautiful (free) Application Launcher

Stacks, Apple’s latest enhancement to the Dock in 10.5 Leopard, provides a limited pop-up view into folders and their contents.

With Stacks you have the choice of folder contents ‘fanning’ out from the Dock or displaying in a grid. But if you’re someone that likes easy access to all your applications from the Dock, then Stacks may not be right for you.

Enter Todos. Todos has been around since 10.4 Tiger and although not a Dock extension of any sort, it provides a single view of all the applications in multiple folders similar to the single folder view provided by Stacks.

Initiating a user definable hotkey (default is cmd+opt+cntl+t) launches a pop-up view of all applications. The display is very clean with a translucent black background displaying rows of colorful application icons. Moving the mouse over an icon will display the application name and location at the top for easy reference. To launch an application, simply click on it once. The application will launch and Todos will fade away. Applications already running are highlighted by a surrounding green box.

The beauty of Todos, which is Spanish for ‘everything’ or ‘all’, is that your can configure which applications or folder of applications to display, but also hide applications without having to move them somewhere else. To do this, open Todos, hold down Option and click on the icon of the application you would like hidden and it will be removed from the display. All hidden applications are listed in the Preferences window should you wish to unhide it.

To display multiple folders of applications, open ToDos Preferences from the icon in the menubar and add additional folder locations. Where I find the multi view particularly useful is in the ability to reference both the user as well as the system-wide Application folders and also the Utilities folder. Add more locations as you please. Todos is one of those little known utility gems that makes Mac OSX such as pleasure to use.

It’s a lightweight and unobtrusive application that you’ll forget is even running, but refer to when you don’t want to go digging through folders to find an application. Todos is a universal binary and available as a free download from OpenSoft Development.