There’s been a lot of talk in the Macintosh community about LaunchBar, so today I downloaded and installed the free demo. Wow! A kind of search field augmented by powerful auto-completion capabilities, LaunchBar is eerily evocative of the prescient, absurdly intelligent computers we tend to see only in the movies. That is, it manages to know pretty much exactly what you want with barely any input.You can, for instance, type in “qxp&#148 and it will return a list of files that start with the letter Q, and that include all three letters Q, X and P. But it will put at the very top of the list “QuarkXPress” — which, in all likelihood, is just what you wanted. According to the Web site, “LaunchBar uses a very powerful, adaptive abbreviation search algorithm that allows you to enter any thinkable abbreviation of the searched item.” It’s a very capable, very intuitive, very convenient way to access virtually anything on your computer. It’s not often that I’m so quickly sold on a new utility, but having had LaunchBar installed for less than six hours now, I’m virtually certain I’m going to pay to register it.