There's a million app launchers out there and I swear I've tried them all only to revert back to just using OS X's plain old dock. For some reason, none have ever clicked with the way I use my Mac. I've tried QuickSilver, Butler, LaunchBar, DragThing among others but usually long before the trial period ends the new launcher is long gone from my hard drive.

That is until I tried OverFlow. Overflow is one of the simplest yet most useful of any app launcher I've ever tried and it's this simplicity that makes it so great. Here's how it works. After you install Overflow, just hit the hot-key to invoke and up pops Overflows minimalist yet attractive semi transparent palette. Hoover over an icon and a nice little white halo appears around it along with the name of the app. Click on an icon and viola! the app you want is launched. Very easy, very cool.

Even better is that you can create categories of similar apps and display them each in their own palette with just a click of a button. For instance, in my Overflow, I have the following categories: Misc. Apps (Yojimbo, KIT, Scrivener, Excel, Word, Journaler, Pages, Keynote, NetFlix Freak, Preview, Assignment Planner, Cha-Ching, Checkbook, Appleworks and Curio), Multimedia (iLife 06 apps, MemoryMiner, Toast, Print Explosion and PhotoShop Elements), Internet (Safari, FireFox, Opera and iChat), Utilities (Disk Utility, AppZapper, 1Passwd, System Preferences, MacTheRipper, Backup 3, TransparentDock and Activity Viewer), Genealogy (Heredis), Games (American History Lux, Platypus and Big Bang Reaction), Reference (AddressBook and Dictionary) and one called Folders to keep folders in. Count all those up and you come up with access to something like 42 apps, all in about 3 X 5 inches of screen space.

Overflow also lives in your dock. If you click and hold on it's icon, up pops a contextual type menu that lists your Categories and subsequent apps in a fly-out type menu. I prefer the palette mode but its nice to have this other option available as well.

Adding apps and folders (or documents) is as easy as invoking Overflow, clicking the Edit button and then dragging and dropping apps onto the palette. You can also click the Add button and a standard OS X drop down navigation sheet will appear and you can select the app you want to add from there. While in Edit mode you can also drag app icons around the palette to better organize. Choose File>New Category and a new palette/category appears in the left hand pane. Type in a name for the category and you're ready to add apps. Lastly, the whole palette is resizable by dragging the lower right hand corner of the window. Click here to view a small movie showing the basics of Overflow.

I have found two little quirks (I don't know if I'd quite call them bugs) with Overflow. The first is that when adding an app to the palette, you have to be careful and hit the container square in the sweet spot, otherwise they all deactivate and you can't drop the app. This doesn't happen all the time and most of the time dragging and dropping an app goes just fine. The second little quirk is that when I hit 8 categories, Overflow would insist on sticking in a scroll bar despite the fact that I could see and access all my category buttons. The fix is to go into Edit mode and enlarge the palette by dragging the lower right hand corner to expose a new row of container squares and then resize it back to the original size. The scroll bar will appear again, when I access the bottom most category, but oh well, I can live with that. I emailed the author, Dan Messing, and he said that he's looking into both issues so hopefully they'll get fixed

All in all Overflow is a really nice launcher and I can definitely live with the aforementioned quirks. It's the first app launcher I've ever really liked and will keep it around for a long time to come. Download the trial and try it out for yourself. It really is a great little app and for $14.95 you can't go wrong.

Overflow 2.0.3 is shareware, available as a universal binary and requires 10.3.9 or better. The trial can be had from Stunt Software and is fully functional for 20 days.

I give Overflow.............9 out of 10 stars (loses 1 for the two minor quirks I found that probably only bug me)!