inessential by Brent Simmons

TigerLaunch

In 2002 I wrote TigerLaunch, a little app-launcher app, and released it for free.

TigerLaunch app icon

In 2019 it still runs — and has 4.5 stars on MacUpdate and a number of comments over the years.

I’d pretty much forgotten about it, until recently when I started getting email from people asking me to make it 64-bit so it will continue to run on future OSes.

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The idea behind TigerLaunch was to make the simplest app-launcher I could make. It adds a menu to your menubar. The menu is a list of apps on your machine, sorted alphabetically. There was a settings screen where you could exclude apps that you never launch.

Here’s the oldest version of the TigerLaunch page that archive.org has.

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I’m considering doing an update. It doesn’t have many users — but the app is 17 years old and it’s still in use. Seems like it would be a shame if it stopped.

It’s such a simple app. I’d just rewrite it from scratch in Swift, probably. Make it open source. The hard part is that it would need a new app icon.

Update a couple days later, because people keep asking: It would need a new app icon because Mac apps these days need larger sizes for app icons than was required in 2002, and I don’t have larger sizes of the icon.