Well AutoStart has been released. I finally felt comfortable enough with its quality to release it to the general public. So now I'd like to get some feedback and drive the bugcount to zero.
For those of you who haven't heard of AutoStart, it is a Launcher for portable apps designed to be both tiny in size and extendable. It creates icons in the taskbar notification area for every USB Flash Drive you have attached to your system.
It can be distributed under GNU General Public License and the sources are availalbe from the Liberta project page. To see the sources you'll need to go to the sourceforge website and look in the subversion repository of Libertà.
You can download a binary from http://xpt.nl/downloads
Here's a rundown of the features:
1. Installer is built-in. So it can install itself on flash drives or on the PC.
2. Supports most of the standard Microsoft autorun.inf features.
3. Automatically generates or updates autorun.inf with applications it finds during installation on a flash drive.
4. Creates an icon in the notification area for every flash drive connected.
5. Start menu for launching applications. Shown when icon is right clicked.
6. Left clicking a trayicon will run app specified by 'shell' value in autorun.inf
7. Right click drive icon gives menu with Unplug/Eject drive option.
8. Eject drive implemented directly through Windows API calls.
9. Designed to leave no trace on a PC when not installed.
10. Tiny, 90KB compressed with exe compressor.
Future Enhancements planned:
1. Implement inplace upgrading
2. Support fixed drive like USB Hard Drives.
3. Support TrueCrypt volumes, both fixed and removable drives.
4. Feedback in the form of balloon help popups.
5. Reduce the size to further to approx 50KB by removing dependencies on ATL7 going back to ATL 3. This will also make it possible to build AutoStart with freely available tools !
6. Support some sort of detection of applications running from a flash drive when ejecting a drive.
7. Last but not least make all internal APIs available as an extension SDK for easy creation of extensions like launchpads.