The well-organized Berokyo program launcher proves that cabinets and shelves can work to corral your digital clutter as well as your real-life bric-à-brac.
Although there are plenty of free launchers available, such as the estimable ObjectDock and the innovative Enso Launcher, the $19 Berokyo justifies its price tag with a distinctive, polished layout and a host of customization features, such as automatically adding the contents of your desktop or start menu folder. After a speedy install you'll see a quick launch menu for your first cabinet. Your best bet is to immediately click \Help & Support in that menu and select the Quick Start Guide for some tips. While Berokyo is well set up for the most part, it's not completely intuitive. In particular, you'll want to know about the app's use of categories before setting up your first cabinet.
Categories appear as shelves in a cabinet, and can be used to organize items by type or purpose. Categories can have subcategories, and each can be collapsed to show only a shelf and a name until you need something within it.
To add items to a category, you can drag and drop, cut and paste or browse among existing items. A number of pre-defined options can pull in control panel applets, administrative tools, and other shortcut collections. If you select a folder with sub-folders inside it, you'll be prompted for how to handle those subfolders. For example, you can add subfolder items as subcategories, skip them or add them all into one main category.
When seeking a particular item among all those categories and subcategories, use the helpful search box at the top of each cabinet. It will filter items as you type to display matching shortcuts. And as you'd expect, you'll find plenty of options for changing the look for each cabinet and individual shortcut.
Cabinets will automatically hide until called up with a hotkey (CTRL and 1 for your first cabinet, 2 for the second, etc.). You can also dock a cabinet to a particular screen edge so that it slides out when moving your mouse to that edge. Another hotkey, CTRL-10 by default, will display all your cabinets at once.
If you're considering a launcher to help organize and access your growing array of programs and documents, take a look at Berokyo. You'll have to shell out a few bucks, but you'll get plenty of nice features for your money.
Note: The download link here is for the Windows version of Berokyo. A Mac version is also available.
--Erik Larkin
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