I'd recommend everybody to try out Alfred, an app that looks like this:

Alfred let's you start any app (image above) or  trigger apps through text input, for example searching songs on Spotify without having to start it first.

You open the quicklaunch window with ⌘+space and start typing, and Alfred will fetch you what you're thinking about. It's fast.

Launchy is really the same thing, it works as a charm.