Namely: Quicksilver without the silver
Namely is an app launcher. Nothing more and nothing less.
You activate it with a user-definable hotkey. The interface pops up at the top of your screen (like Launchbar) or wherever else you configure it to appear.
Type in the first few letters of the app you want, and it begins to sort:
You can wait until there is only one choice left, or navigate down using the arrow keys to select your target.
I am perhaps unfair to the app when I think of it as the poor man’s Quicksilver. If real productivity is about finding the most efficient tools for the job, tools without extraneous “feature bloat”, and you are not interested in all the wonderful things that Quicksilver 
(or LaunchBar or Butler ) can do, this might be just what you are looking for.
And although it lacks the silver, it is certainly quick. After indexing your hard drive the first time you start it up, it is blisteringly fast.
Namely 2.1, recently released, is a universal binary, fixes previously erratic behaviour on external displays and includes several usability improvements.
It is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site
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May 23rd, 2006 at 7:23 am
Currently, I have disabled Spotlight on my Mac Mini and configured Quicksilver to function solely as an application launcher, but Namely might serve my purposes better for what I need. I think I will have to compare their memory usage and see which one is more frugal.
May 23rd, 2006 at 7:35 am
I’d be interested to hear the answer.
May 31st, 2006 at 7:56 am
I’m one of those guys who’s been using Quicksilver simply as an App launcher, and nothing else. I guess that’s a bit of overkill. It looks like Namely uses 25 MB of RAM on my system, vs 80+ MB for quicksilver. I think I’ll probably switch.