A launcher with tabs

There are many ways to launch applications on your Mac: looking through your Finder, launching from the Dock or via a Spotlight search. Another solution is to use an application launcher.

TabMeister is not your typical launcher though. The application allows you to quickly reach apps from a tabbed interface at the bottom left of your screen. You can’t create as many tabs as you want and fill them up with as many items as you want, by dragging them onto the tab. When browsing over an item in your tab it will display its icon on your screen in a higher resolution.

I liked the idea of creating different tabs for different needs, however I felt that TabMeister was fairly similar to the grid view, which I use for the Applications folder on my Dock. I was also a little annoyed that you can’t move the tab around, as they do tend to get in the way with the Dock and opened folders.

Despite the placement of the app, I quite like the tabbed interface the TabMeister application launcher offers.

TabMeister is a great little desktop utility that helps you quickly get to applications, files, and folders without having to always search for them on your hard drive. The Dock in Mac OS X is a great place to put a few of your basic things that you use often, but the Dock is just too small to fit all the stuff you’d like to have easy access to, and there’s not much organization to the Dock.

So, what TabMeister does is allow you to add Tabs to your desktop that act like pop-up folders containing icons of all of the things you want to have access to. For example, you can create a Tab named “Graphics”, and in that Tab you can store links to all of your graphics applications that you use. Normally, you’ll just see a small tab at the edge of the screen, but when you roll the mouse over it, it automatically pops up: