Gomigo gives quick access to favorite applications from Windows' system tray

If you’re looking for a faster way to access your Windows applications then you could pin the appropriate shortcuts to your taskbar, but that gets cluttered fairly easily. And while the Start menu offers more customization options, it’s also more bulky, and about to disappear in Windows 8 anyway.

Still, no problem, Gomigo is a more lightweight launcher that could be just what you need.

Launch the program for the first time and it’ll add a new icon to your system tray, and clicking this displays a small and very focused menu of applications. Which on our test PC included Calc, Notepad, and a couple of menus pointing to our installed browsers and Office 2012 applications.

This isn’t going to be enough, of course, and so clicking Control > New Element will allow you to add further options to the menu. You’re able to include new executables, documents, even web pages in just a click or two. Or you might opt to create a custom menu -- “Graphics”, say -- where you can then group together related programs, URLs and other resources.

We’re not entirely sure how necessary a program like Gomigo really is. If you want quick access to a particular set of shortcuts, you could always store them in a folder, then add that to your desktop (right-click the taskbar, select Toolbars > New Toolbar).

And that more homespun approach would avoid having to run Gomigo in the background all the time, where it can consume 20MB of RAM. (Not a great deal these days, but more than we’d expected considering what the program is doing.)

Gomigo looks good, works well and may be able to save you a click or two when running your favorite applications, though, which is more than enough to justify its existence. And so if you’re looking for a new launcher then it should probably be somewhere on your shortlist.