X out of 10

I make no bones about it: I’m a Mac guy. Unfortunately, my work computer is a PC.

When I’m at work, one of the features of my Mac at home I miss most is Spotlight. Spotlight is a nifty addition to OS X that helps you find pretty much anything on your computer—applications, music, documents, Address Book entries and more. In my experience, though, Spotlight is best used as an application launcher: just hit the Spotlight keystroke (by default Cmd+Space Bar), type a few letters of the name of the app you’re looking for, arrow down to select it, and press Enter. It sounds like a lot of steps, but it only takes about two seconds. Most importantly, it’s way better than digging through your Applications folder or cluttering up your Dock with icons.

Windows XP, among many other things, has no Spotlight-esque feature, just a sub-par desktop search app with an irritating animated dog. Forget where you installed a particular app in XP? You could go routing through your Start menu, or navigate your way to the Program Files folder on your hard drive, or fill your desktop with shortcuts, but those methods are all clumsy and inefficient. This is the gap that Launchy very elegantly fills.

Launchy works pretty much like Spotlight: hit the keystroke, start typing, and press Enter to launch. Launchy can optionally index your documents as well (something that Spotlight does automatically), so that you can type a word or phrase and instantly see all documents containing that word or phrase. Very nifty indeed!

X=8.9: score another point for the open-source community for producing an incredibly useful piece of software that is both free of charge and free to change. Not without it’s shortcomings, but the vast developer community ensures that this application will evolve—hopefully for the better—very rapidly.

Download Launchy at Launchy.net