I’m a vivid supporter of doing as much as you can with your keyboard and have installed an application launcher with every OS that I’ve used. On OSX I’ve tried several but didn’t find one I liked until I tried Alfred.
Alfred is an application launcher with a little extra, developed by the team at Running with Crayons which just made a pre release of version 0.7.2. To get all of the features that Alfred support you have to buy what they call the Powerpack which at the time of writing cost £12. Since it’s such a great piece of software I see no reason not to support it.
Features which Alfred supports:
The features I’ve found myself using the most is of course the application launcher but also, define and spell. Define is great for when you’re reading articles on the web. I’ve also started using the file structure navigation and folder search to quickly move around. I’ll probably come back to Alfred when I find new great uses cases.