I was shamed into buying LaunchBar for Mac OS X last night.

I was hanging out with some people at the Peppermill after the BANG meeting last night. I pulled out my Lombard PowerBook G3 to show Bill Bumgarner a problem I've been having with dialing out for PPP.

He tried to bring up LaunchBar, and when it didn't activate, he looked at me, stunned. "You don't have Launchbar?!"

"Um... er, I had the LaunchBar 3 beta on ten-oh, but I found it too slow. Is it fast now?"

Didn't I look silly. Any real OS X geek uses LaunchBar. ;-) My boss Patrice has been using it forever on OS X Server 1.x (Rhapsody), and man, can he ever fly around his system insanely fast as a result. He hardly ever touches the mouse.

Also, osx.macnn.com reports today that WindowShade for OS X 1.1 is now out, and it supports Cocoa apps as well as Carbon apps. It's only $7! WindowShade was the thing I missed most when moving from 9 to X, so I jumped on that immediately too.