a new generation of Launcher

I was quite pleased with Launchbar 3 - easy to use, fast, reliable...
There came a time when I wasn't able to work on any Mac without Launchbar anymore.

By accident (del.icio.us) I saw they released the Beta of Launchbar 4. OK, it is programmed by Austrians, but still, they know what they're doing! ;-)

It feels a little bit slower than v.3, but the features are well worth this small lag. And I think I haven't even found all the features yet.

You can, of course, still launch all your programs with abbrevations - meaning, you just press Command-Space, then itu <enter> and iTunes starts. Every character filters the list of possible programs, and if you choose iTunes after pressing only i, from now on it will be started by pressing i.

But of course, there are not only your programs in the list, but also your bookmarks and your contacts. And the Preference Panes. And your Folders. You can start nearly everything.

OK, so all of this was already possible with v.3 - what the heck was I missing? Well, actually, I wasn't missing anything, until I saw v.4:

• index of your iTunes & iPhoto Library, Browser History (not just Safari, but OmniWeb, Camino, whatever)
• list of recently used items: browse through your last documents
• live updating of index: new programs are available immediately
• Smart Groups: group your programs, documents, songs, photos
• complete file system browsing, including moving, open with, ...
• file content search: search inside your text-, rtf-, html-files
• and so on...

Just while typing this, I discovered the feature "Open Terminal Here": Just enter the abbrevation of a folder and press Command-T.

The update is really worth the 10.-- EUR.