Find and Run Robot 2 is the fastest application launcher for Windows I have ever used. Google Desktop fails in comparison when it comes to speed, and it doesn't make my CPU go crazy when indexing like Launchy. After adding a new directory to the list of folders to index, FARR picked up on the files I was searching for in less than a second. It really is stunningly fast. It registers on my machine as only taking up 12MB of RAM.

Quicksilver is a speedy application launcher for the Mac. Of all the application launchers that I have tried for all platforms quicksilver is by far the absolute best. Speed is everything with an application launcher, and quicksilver earns its title. But quicksilver is not just your ordinary application launcher. It has hundreds of built-in and downloadable plug-ins that allow it to communicate and manipulate many different applications and file-system functions. Need to rename a file?

Taskbar Shuffle is a neat system utility for Windows that allows you to organize the tasks in the taskbar by clicking and dragging them around. The program is very light-weight. You can choose to have it run at startup and hide in the background (free up some of those icons in the notification area). It has a splashscreen at startup which you can also disable. Another neat feature it includes is the ability to close a window by middle-clicking it (you can do that by clicking on the little scroll wheel on the mouse); this is a feature that is used in many web browsers to close tabs.

I hate to categorize Enso with other application launchers, because it is so much more than that. Enso attempts to connect computing with language. Enso appears to be rather original in its approach, but for those familiar, it breathes of language like Ubiquity and Application Launcher/Searcher like Quicksilver.