GNOME Launch Box is a software program that serves as an application launcher for the GNOME desktop environment. It allows users to easily launch their desired programs and applications from a simple interface.
Launch Box is written to be compatible with the GNOME 2.10 platform and has several dependencies, including GTK+ 2.6, evolution-data-server 1.2, and gnome-menus. These are currently considered hard dependencies, but the developers intend to eventually split the backends into optional modules.
Currently, Launch Box supports several modules, including application launching, Evolution contacts lookup and email sending, recent files lookup and opening, files on the desktop, and Firefox bookmarks lookup and opening.
Launch Box was created during a hackathon held by Imendio in January of 2005. The team consisted of four developers: Anders Carlsson, Mikael Hallendal, Michael Natterer, and Richard Hult.
The software's design is based on LbItem objects. Plugins are used to query for items that match the current search string. Items come in different types, which allows plugins to save data in them and enables the module manager to compare items and merge them in the future.
When an item is found, the manager is queried for actions that can be taken on that item. All modules that can interact with the item should add an action to it. In the future, actions will be weighted so that the most likely action is prioritized.
Overall, GNOME Launch Box shows great potential as an application launcher for GNOME, and it will likely continue to improve as development continues.
Version 0.4: N/A