A better Mac launcher

I've always been fascinated by utilities that launch applications or nifty little processes that make computing faster, simpler, more reliable and satisfying because effective.

One day I might give a bit of my history in this area, but for now. The Mac experience.

Spotlight was, and is, useful and effective, as far as it goes. But, it doesn't seem to go far enough.

One thing I want to do is easily launch applications to let me do the productive work I want to. Spotlight wants to do everything. I really just want to start applications and sometimes other little tasks.

Oh for the XP start menu. Not brilliant, but effective.

First stop on the Mac was Quicksilver. Its understated subtlety hooked me immediately; and I may even go back to it. However, I didn't like that it left everything hidden; I needed to know what I was after; and could I get the name of that rarely used, but now sought after application right. No, of course I'd be prodding around in futility for ages.

Quicksilver: just too slippery.

I bought Launchbar. It seemed to be stronger, I liked its configurability better. It was less a dark art than Quicksilver. But now tired of it. I usually want a quick start and short use of the computer, and Launchbar added a loading lead time that was irritating, there was lots of other mucking around selecting stuff, getting the sequence right, and so on. Not quite me.

I killed it this evening, even tho' I'd paid good big AUDs for it.

Now, Butler has been  hanging around my system for ages. Let's fire it up. Hmm. Out of date for 10.5. It seemed to hang in the configuration window, and I couldn't see clearly what to even do to get the simple drop down menu of applications.

I've killed it too. But maybe will go back to it some time.

A nice application I tried a while ago was more visual: Overflow. One could arrange applications into named panes. I had panes for words, graphics, etc. Was pretty easy. But it seemed to have too much system overhead, was too big on the screen, and didn't do the little tasks that Butler, Launchbar and QS could do. So it went too.

So, for now, I'm back to the Dock, Applications folder, and Spotlight.

I'll keep you posted.