Starting Applications
There are many ways to start applications but I especially like doing it with shortcuts from the keyboard. In Windows, you can assign a specific shortcut to any application (one way is to right click on its icon and type the shortcut into the Shortcut key of the Shortcut Tab) but a more general way is to do it in the application called Launchy. Launchy indexes your All Programs list and after opening launchy (e.g. by Alt-Space) you just have to type something that distinguishes the application you want to run (generally only 1 or 2 characters). This can become a pretty quick operation and I find it very intuitive. Also, Launchy can be extended to look in more places and for more than just applications.
It turns out that Launchy is an imitator of a similar but even more powerful program on the Mac called Quicksilver. Quicksilver is an amazing program and launching programs is just the beginning of its usefulness (which I’ll describe as I explore it some more). However, that’s a good place to start.
After installing and running Quicksilver it will place itself on the right side of the menu bar (it looks like a white Q on a grey background). You can access its preferences from there but to use it you just invoke it (Control-space by default) and start typing in the name of the application to launch. It is really smart about figuring out which application you want but if it doesn’t get it exactly right, just wait a second and a list of possibilities will open to the right of the main pane. Use the arrow keys to go down to the application you want and hit enter. Quicksilver is adaptive and will remember which applications you have launched and so it will take fewer keystrokes to invoke them in the future. It works really well.
There are a number of tutorials linked to on the Quicksilver website (this one is good to get started). You’ll need these to explore more advanced features of the program.