Press Release Summary = A convenient alternative to the \"Start\" menu for starting programs quickly.
Press Release Body = The OrdinarySoft company has released a new free program named Vista Start Menu. It is intended to replace the standard Start menu. It is already the company\'s second step in making work with the Start menu more comfortable: the company released the program Tidy Start Menu earlier. The new program completely replaces the Start menu with its new concept of interface implementation.
The Start menu appeared in Windows 95 for the first time. After that only cosmetic changes were made in it and only in Windows XP there was a weak attempt to change something, but no changes were made concerning the most important purpose of the Start button - launching programs.
Do you need any changes in the Start menu? No, you don\'t if you have only a dozen programs installed. If there are more programs, launching one program requires time directly proportional to the number of installed programs. The problem is partially solved by the Quick Launch Panel, but it also becomes useless when the number of programs increases.
Let us see why we spend so much time on starting programs. Look at programs in the Start menu, most of them differ only in their labels and, as a rule, you have to read all these labels to launch the program you need. In the worst case you have to read as many labels as there are program installed. It would be great if all these programs were presented not with text, but with their own icons. This method would employ the natural ability of a human mind to recognize images and you would find the program you need in no time.
That\'s what Vista Start Menu does! It presents programs installed in the system as a table of icons. To start an application, you just open the menu and click its icon. If you need files installed with the program, just move the mouse pointer to the icon and select the file you need from the popup menu.
What else is inconvenient in the standard menu from the point of view of human perception? The standard menu is arranged in the form of a list and if we remove or add programs, the position of other items also changes no matter whether we want it or not. Thus, the natural ability of a human mind to remember the position of items is not used. Vista Start Menu is devoid of this drawback: when you remove programs, icons do not change their position and the place of the removed program remains empty. This position will be occupied by a new program later.
To sum it up, we can say that the interface of the new program is user-friendly. However, it may seem unusual to someone after a decade of using the inconvenient standard interface.