We have updated the German language file for KO Approach 0.5 Build 284. Again, thanks to our great contributor Jan Schröder for his thorough work!

We hope, you'll be as excited as we are! For a limited time, KO Approach is available for purchasing at less than one third of its original price. For KO Approach Basic it means five ninety five – cheaper than ordering a pizza! No hidden fees, no limitations, no nags!

You will get a fully functional license that allows you to unlock all of the functionality. Here's just a brief list:

• Folder Menus for one click directory navigation
• Approach Items for instant access to favorite apps, documents, and URLs
• Titlebar Menus for CTRL+click parent directory hierarchy navigation
• Unlimited menu depth
• Previewing graphics and text files from KO Approach menus
• WAV sound playback from KO Approach menus
• Full support for contextual menus
• The ability to copy to clipboard a file listing of any directory
• Free upgrades

To sum things up, with KO Approach, opening files and folders is non-distracting, fast, and fun. And affordable!

Being honest, $5.95 is not the type of price I particularly like. The reason is: with the price less than $10.00 our payment processor takes 15% from every sold license, so we only get sligtly more than five dollars. Well, here's another deal: the Advanced license for just eleven ninety five! This is a great offer if you plan to run KO Approach on many computers.

But forget about money. We love our users. We love when they post feedback to us. It's great when their feedback is positive. If the feedback is negative, we do our best to learn from it. So please send us your thoughts even if you don't feel like paying. And have fun using KO Approach!

We are happy to announce the release of KO Approach version 0.5. It offers some cool improvements over the previous version.

Better Icon Handling

KO Approach now offers additional options that control icon handling. If you value speed over fancy look when browsing menus, you can now instruct KO Approach to display generic icons. These icons help identify item type (application, folder, or file) and consume the least possible amount of resources.

If you still want to see regular icons, similar to Windows Explorer, KO Approach now offers icon overlay support for shortcuts and items under version control. Plus, we have used sophisticated optimization techniques to speed up the process of retrieving icons.

Better Scrolling

Now you can see how many items are not visible in a menu. Scrolling arrows display a counter of remaining items to scroll in either direction. This also gives you an idea how many files there are in a folder. You can also control scroll arrow positioning. Scroll KO Approach menus faster, the way you want, by choosing one of three modes: both arrows at top, both arrows at bottom, or each arrow located at the respective menu edge.

Better Usability

We have improved the Options window to make it more friendly and more concept-oriented. It now consists of more intuitive categories: Features, Menus & Scrolling, Contents, Maintenance, Registration, and About. Everything is in place, although you may forget KO Approach is running as you get used to its handy features. We have made every visual aspect of the program compatible with scaled DPI modes. Should you choose 125%, 150%, 200% or even a custom DPI scaling ratio, KO Approach displays text and icons clear and sharp.

And, of course, there are other enhancements and bugfixes, so upgrade and have fun using KO Approach!

It's been slightly more than a month since we released KO Approach version 0.4.4. Now we're excited to say that version 0.4.5 is here. We decided to publish updates more frequently in order to keep the users and the contributors in better sync with what we do at KO Software.

We should say that it is mostly a service release. One of the motives for it is that the previous version provides absolutely no support for right-to-left text direction. With this new version, the Hebrew language file is finally available for download. That means, thousands of users from Israel can now access Windows folders and files faster, in their mother tongue! I would like to thank Arik S. Petrov once again for his great work.

Regarding localization, I am hoping that a German language file is coming real soon now.

Another reason for this upgrade is the feedback we've been getting from some of our users who complain that there is no way to tell which plug-in is loaded in the unregistered mode. Well, we've added a new page to the Options dialog box. Hopefully, this should address the issue:

With this page, unregistered users will have more control over which plug-ins are loaded. For example, if you do not need to preview text files and play back WAV sounds instantly, but do need to quickly preview graphics from KO Approach menus, you can disable InstantTxt.dll and InstantWave.dll so that Scope.dll will be loaded. In other words, you can tell KO Approach to load only those plug-ins that you need.

There are also some security updates in this release that improve the overall stability of the product. We highly encourage everybody to upgrade. Have fun using KO Approach!

KO Software now has a YouTube channel featuring KO Approach demonstration videos. As of today, we've added two demonstrations.

The first video is an introduction to KO Approach. You will see how KO Approach really speeds up access to Windows folders and files.

The second video describes program downloading and installation completely from scratch. You will see that KO Approach installs in just a few seconds. Immediately after installation, KO Approach runs in the Unregistered mode. You can run the program under this mode for unlimited time with only a few limitations. The main features, such as quick file and folder access, are still available.

Please visit us at http://www.youtube.com/kirillosipov for more content!