First:
I’m a bit late, but Merry Christmas and Happy new year. (he says, almost in February)
Now…
You want to know what piece of software I suddenly feel nostalgic for?
No?
What do I care.
The Office shortcut bar.
490 Words
I miss you bro :'(
I remember using it back in the early 2000s, great way to keep my desktop organized.
It was great, it just docked to the side of the desktop and had a load of shortcuts all neatly arranged.
I normally had 2, one with shortcuts for games and one for other programs.
Then in Office XP (or was it in 2003?) it disappeared.
A few times along the years I remember it and miss it. Then I forget about it for some reason.
A couple of days ago, I missed it again. I really, really missed it. (my desktop is a complete mess)
So off I went looking for a solution.
The usual work around you find on the internet is using a windows toolbar.
Problem is those can’t “float” since Vista (I think). Sure as hell doesn’t work on 7.
Searching for a better solution…
And fooking hell…no one understands the genius and usefulness of the office shortcut bar. (Except me of course)
Because there is almost no viable alternative to it.
In the age of free/open source software, easy availability of programming resources and everyone making 1001 programs for every single facet of life. There is one alternative to the office shortcut bar…ONE!
Must mean there’s another guy who understood the genius of the bar.
But it hasn’t been updated since 2008.
And it’s laid out horizontally, instead of vertically. (that’s a minus, but idgaf)
On the pros, it’s open source…
…but it’s written with VB6, that has been out of circulation for over 10 years. And VB6 doesn’t work on windows 7.
That alternative is FreeBar ( http://freebar.sourceforge.net/en/ ), in case someone is curious.
It works well enough I guess.
And if the only programming language that I’m even remotely familiar with wasn’t C# I would be right now trying to make my own alternative to the office shortcut bar.
Right now I could corner the market of office shortcut bar alternatives. How cool would that be?!
I guess not very cool, as I seem to be the only person in the world who misses the bar.
Well, I was looking for a good excuse to re-learn Pascal to try Lazarus and FreePascal. (on an aside, my first “Hello World” program was actually written in Borland Delphi 2 or 3, back in 2000)
I actually wanted to try FreeBasic and FBide , but they seem to be quite dead (and their sites are offline, I found the sourceforge pages by chance), FP and Lazarus on the other hand seem pretty healthy, thankfully.
It also helps that I have, for years, wanted to go back to something that isn’t dependent on .NET for my little home projects.
And this is all the ranting for now.