As soon as I have a faster Mac, I’ll purchase a license for LaunchBar. It’s easily the best, uhm, launch bar I’ve tried.
Windows has its start menu, OS X has its Dock (capital D is important, I’m told). I’ve never been a big fan of the start menu in Windows, though I think it got slightly better with the big-ass menu in Windows XP. But it’s still annoying to find stuff in it, since I have to traverse through a whole bunch of sub-menus to get what I want.
The Dock is better, but it has very limited space — you can only fit so many icons in it before it fills the bottom of the screen, and when it does that it shrinks the icons to fit the new ones.
With LaunchBar, I hit Cmd+Space to activate it, and then type a few letters. It has an algorithm that is very good at guessing what you want — It correctly guessed “Dreamweaver” when I typed “dw”. It then associates this keyword to the application launched — the more times the keyword is used, the stronger the association gets.
LaunchBar uses an adaptive evaluation algorithm to find the best matching items based on the abbreviation you type in. A sophisticated rating system considers the position and density of the given letters within the name of each item defined in the setup. The resulting ratings are then adjusted based on the items previous usage. The more often a specific item or abbreviation was used in the past, the better it will be rated. LaunchBar learns from the users habits. LaunchBar details
With LaunchBar I have a “cloud” of all applications, Safari bookmarks, email addresses and other stuff. I just type a few letters, and it displays what it thinks are good matches. This is much faster than navigating the start menu in Windows, or digging in folders in Finder to start that application you don’t have in your Dock.
I love it. Too bad I haven’t found anything similar for Windows.
Also, by pure accident I just discovered that you can select several cells in a table by Ctrl-clicking them in Mozilla, and then copy the contents of just the selected cells. Very nice feature.