visit most often; the jump list for Windows Media Player shows songs you’ve played a lot lately. The point, of course, is that you can reopen a file just by clicking its name. Jump lists can save you time when you want to resume work on something you had open recently but you’re not in the mood to burrow through folders to find its icon. Often, jump lists also include shortcut-menu-ish commands, like New Message (for an email program), Play/Pause (for a jukebox program), or Close All Windows (just about any program). As Microsoft puts it, it’s like having a separate Start menu for every single program. Interestingly enough, the same jump lists appear both in the Start menu and in your taskbar (Figure 1-15). Figure 1-15: Jump lists display the most recently opened documents in each program. These submenus show up in the Start menu (left), but they also sprout from the taskbar when you right-click a program’s icon there (right).
You have several ways to make jump lists appear: •• In the Start menu. A ˘ button next to a program’s name in the Start menu means a jump list awaits. (In general, a program sprouts a jump list automatically if you’ve used it to open or play files.) To open the jump list, either click the ˘ or just point to the program’s name without clicking. The submenu opens automatically after about half a second.
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windows 7: the missing manual