Is this the greatest piece of software ever?

The makers of Rocket Dock, an application for quickly launching programs in Windows Vista, make a bold claim: that it is the single greatest piece of software ever. Although that boast is pretty debateable (and to be fair not made entirely seriously) Rocket Dock is certainly a wonderfully useful application that will speed up the way you use Windows Vista in an elegant and good looking fashion. I’ve been using it a lot recently, and I’ve found it really addictive - not something you can usually say about an application launcher.

Hovering over the icon of the program you want to launch enlarges it.

The beauty of Rocket Dock is that you can quickly launch any application you wish straight from your desktop. Any program you want to add to Rocket Dock can simply be dragged and dropped onto it, giving you direct access to all your most used applications.

Drag and drop shortcuts onto Rocket Dock to add them.

The Rocket Dock interface is similar in appearance to Dock, the application launcher found in the Mac OS, and scrolling through icons is smooth and attractive. You can also send minimised applications to the Rocket Dock, and these are combined with the Live Taskbar Thumbnails feature of Windows Vista, which gives you a live preview of your minimised program.

Rocket Dock gives you live previews of your minimised programs.

There are many more features designed to help you increase productivity and use Windows Vista faster than ever, and it is completely customisable to let you use it the way you want to. Best of all it’s free, so it’s definitely worth going over to http://rocketdock.com to give it a try.