There are also similar apps for Windows — and as with the Mac you’ll end up splitting your time between the operating system’s built-in search and the launcher app. You can find a bunch of links to apps in this genre on Wikipedia and debates about the best one all over the internet.

Quicksilver still has its proponents, of course, as do other launcher apps like LaunchBar or Butler . It’s as easy to get into arguments on the internet about which launcher app is better as it is to debate the merits of Macs vs PCs. Each tool offers largely similar features, so choosing one over the other often boils down to a matter of taste.

It turns out that there’s a long history of extensible launcher apps on the Mac, but the one that is most likely to cause old school users to launch into misty-eyed remembrances of computing past is Quicksilver . Although it’s still under active development by a new team, the original developer, Nicholas Jitkoff, was hired by Google and works on the Google Quick Search Box — yet another launcher.

A launcher app like Alfred may not sound like something that you really need in your life — who wants to have to remember more ways to interact with their computer? The best way to know is to just install it and give it a shot, and I think that the most basic feature of Alfred will have you hooked in fairly short order: Google search. (Yes, you can set the default to Bing if that’s your style).

To do it, you simply launch Alfred, type what you want to search, and hit Enter. That’s it. What’s hard to get across is just how convenient it is to be able to jump into a web search no matter where you are on your computer. Instead of switching to the browser and opening a new tab or mousing up to the search bar, you just type the thing you want to know about.

I also use it to directly open webpages — Alfred is smart enough to recognize that when you add a ".com" to the end of your term, what you want to do is open that site. Similarly, if you type the name of an app, you can just hit enter and launch that app.

The philosophy is "just type what you want" and most the time, Alfred does it. In rare cases where Alfred thinks you want to launch an app instead of doing a search — say you want to search the web for "iTunes," you can just type "g iTunes" to clear things up and get your web search.

Alfred tells me that I use it around forty times per day (which actually seems low to me), and the vast majority of my usage is quick Google searching. Even if you never use any of the other features Alfred has to offer, just having fast and easy access to Google from anywhere on your computer makes it worth the install.