Session files can save you effort
Creating "session files" can help you speed up your work and also give you a tiny little bit of rest by preventing you from doing repetitive tasks every day again and again.
For example, when you work on some kind of project (webdesign, audio, video, graphics), maybe you often start some sort of programs at once, together, like say |:Paintbrush - Photoshop - ColorPickerTool - ImageViewer:| or maybe |:Audacity - MusicPlayer - FrequencyAnalyzer:| and so on.
Instead of browsing through your system menus and launching applications, or even instead of just clicking shortcuts on the desktop or on a launcher application, you can create simple (or complex) scripts that will do the job for you while you sit back and watch.
With these "session" scripts you can launch multiple applications at once, from one place by clicking one icon. Sometimes when launching manually, you maybe got used to adding delays between starting resource-intensive applications so that your CPU can handle it better. Session scripts can take care of it for you too, you can define as long delays as you want.There are at least 2 ways of creating such scripts:
- You might want to use some of many task automating applications which can handle a lot of routine work (eg. AutoIt, free; xStarter, paid; EasyMacro, paid)
- You can write a simple batch script for your system handler using commands like "start %program_xyz% -parameter1 - parameter2 | application_abc" and so on
I won't describe using automating programs because they vary from each other and moreover they usually contain a comprehensible tutorial or help files. Using batch scripts is very easy (at least for our purpose), you can find a lot of tutorials and examples either for Windows, Mac or Unix systems. To completely hide (minimize) running batch script on Windows, I use a great freeware application called cmdow which lets you do stuff like that and a lot more.
Using these session files can help you to save a little effort, maybe few seconds of your life. But every single second counts, right ;)
Thanks a lot.
You’re right. AutoIt is OK, I use it from time to time.
AutoIt will perfectly manage those session files. I don´t know xStarter or EasyMacro, so I can´t tell if they could do it as well. But since AutoIt3 you can even create a small GUI. Or in this case a tray menu would be great to easily start all your sessions from. And it isn´t hard at all, manipulating and merging some of the example scripts of AutoIt should work.