Control Runner 4 - New import features

Posted by admin on October 5, 2008 in launch

This is the second post of the Control Runner 4 Sneak Peek series.

As the author of Control Runner, I am a little bit partial about it. What I mean is that I made it primarily to serve my needs, so I find it very convenient and easy to use.

Well, not really, there is something that I don’t like about Control Runner and that is the Import system. The current system to import shortcuts from the Start Menu simply doesn’t work.

But this is going to change in version 4, and I am going to show what are the new features I have implemented to make Importing your existing (and new) programs a breeze.

The old import dialog

This is how the current import dialog looks like:

There are two problems with this dialog. The first one is that, starting on Windows XP there are in fact two Start menus. One is the Start menu shared by all users of the computer (let’s call it the Common menu), the other contains just the items available for each individual user (that is, of course, the User menu).

Windows itself merges both menus when you open the Start menu, in such a way that you don’t usually know which items belong to each menu. And that is how it should be.

The other problem is that, the Import dialog displays items in a listview. That means that you have to open each ‘folder’ to see its contents.

For these reasons, I don’t use anymore the Import dialog to import programs to Control Runner. Since most installation programs give the option to install a shortcut to the program on the Desktop, I use that shortcut to install the program on Control Runner.

The new import dialog

The new import dialog is shown below:

As you can see the ‘Common’ an ‘User’ button are missing. That is because on the new version both menus are merged together, as they should be.

Also, you’ll notice that the Start menu is shown using a Tree, which is the right way to show something with a tree structure like a menu system.

If you click on the image, you will see that I happen to have 683 items on 191 folders on my Start menu. If you are a little like me, then you’ll appreciate as I do the new filter items feature.

As you can see on the screen shot, filtering my Start menu with the words ‘Control Runner’ leaves only the items related to Control Runner on my Start menu.

The New items dialog

Importing existing items is made easy by the new Import dialog, but when you are a long time user of Control Runner you’ll have already setup all your applications correctly on Control Runner. What is needed is a quick way to setup the new items as you install new applications on your computer. For that reason, Control Runner 4 has a nice ‘New items’ dialog.

Whenever Control Runner detects that something has been added to your Start menu, a button will appear on the toolbar of the main window:

Clicking on that button will open the New Items dialog that is shown on the left.

As you see, this dialog only shows the Items just added to the start menu, in this case the icon for the great File Manager program, FileBoss.

Importing existing or new items to Control Runner has never been easier.

Keep tuned, next week I’ll present the new monitoring options of Control Runner.

1 Comment on Control Runner 4 - New import features

By Mladen Vladimirov on October 19, 2008 at 11:52 am

Hey Manuel!

Thank you very much. I am impressed that you have not only answered me so quickly, but also that your new import system is great! Congratulations from Sofia.

- M. Vladimirov