Very polished, very reliable, and arguably the best abbreviation recognition in my experience. I feel constrained without LaunchBar nowadays. I'm using this in conjunction with DragThing. Both are essential to me. Strongly recommended.

Not sure if it's worth the money when comparing it Quicksilver. Still a pretty solid program nonetheless.

v5 is awesome.

This app rules. like most others, I first used this when it was pretty much the only app of its kind, and I marveled at how it seemingly read my mind. Then, I of course dabbled with and eventually switched to quicksilver for a couple years and I loved its plugins and power... until it started crashing on me left and right. Saw Launchbar 5's features and switched back to LB immediately. Excellent.

Although LaunchBar was the first app of its type that I tried back in the day, it always seemed to be missing something and I left it for Butler, then Quicksilver, both of which I depended on at different times.

LB5 sees the app finally realise its full potential and after extensive use during the beta period I now rely solely on its features, simplicity, speed and stability. Love it!

The new beta is superb. I was jumping back and forth between Quicksilver and LaunchBar but, man, this new version is just great. No more switching for awhile.

To use an ancient, worn out cliché comment:

"This should be packaged in the default OS X installation."

Or something along those lines… It's just that good. I don't feel anything more than that is necessary to say. Just give it a try and you're bound for a completely new experience using computers.

I'm just curious, is there anything similar in the Windows world, of the same competence as LaunchBar?

Hands Down the best and most useful application launcher for OS X. I can't use a Mac without it.

If I could get anything close to the search templates in Spotlight, I would use Spotlight only. I've tried, but my most used feature in Launchbar turned out to be the tons of search templates I have got.

I tried to use Spotlight and the shortcuts in OmniWeb instead. They are almost the same, but it won't cut it. It's Launchbar for now.

Props to Launchbar for starting the instant-search craze on the mac. But now that Spotlight in Leopard is reasonably fast, and Quicksilver is stable, Launchbar is pretty much obsolete. Though I do respect the poor souls who got addicted to Launchbar and refuse to give it up no matter what else comes out, even if it's better. (Myself I can no longer see the need to pay for this functionality.)