Applications

I used to use a bunch of methods of starting applications in OSX Tiger: spotlight, the recent apps menu, fire up a finder instance, but now in Leopard I only ever use my Application stack from the dock. I've created aliases for the most useful programs that aren't directly in the Applications folder (ie they are in subfolders or /Developer) and turned on the highlight effect. I've even started to develop mouse-memory for where they are in the stack.

Try it, you might like it.. here's a pic of mine.