# Instant Magic

By [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://paragraph.com/@nickgrossman) · 2012-08-29

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Yesterday afternoon, I caught up for a coffee with [Andrew Parker](http://twitter.com/andrewparker).  After a wide-ranging and enjoyable discussion about app ecosystems and tech policy, we talked a bit about speed.  This post (which I'll keep short, in its own spirit) is about why speed is so important, awesome, and magical. I wrote recently about [reinventing the home row](http://wayback.theslowhunch.net/2012/08/reinventing-the-home-row/), and specifically about [Brewster](http://brewster.com) and [Cue](http://cueup.com), two apps that I think have a lot of potential.  As it happens, in both cases, my primary frustration is that they're not fast enough.  In both cases, what I want is "instant magic" -- fire it up, get straight to what I want to do, and bam! Speed is important everywhere, but it's extra extra important in apps that I fire up often, and for short periods of time.  In the case of Brewster, it's to find someone -- quickly -- and contact them.  In the case of Cue, it's to find out what's next in my day.  In the case of Foursquare, it's to quickly check in wherever I am.  In all of these cases, I'm just hopping into the app for a second, to do one quick thing, and hopping out.  Many times a day.  When this happens quickly, my heart is warmed with web awesome.  When I find myself waiting for these apps to launch or load data, my blood pressure rises and I curse technology's crushing grip on my life. In talking about this with Andrew, he pointed me to [CloudMagic](http://cloudmagic.com), an app that creates a search index across your cloud services, like Gmail, Google Docs, and Twitter.  CloudMagic's slogan is "Find stuff in a second" and the first testimonial, from TechCrunch, is "It's really, really, really fast".  And boy, is it. Within seconds of installing CloudMagic, I was flying through it -- popping it open, searching for something, finding it, and hopping off to the thing I was looking for. Warm happiness filled my body instantly.  After using the app for 1 minute, I moved it to the home screen on my phone.  After installing the browser button, it's first in my list. [Greplin](https://www.cueup.com/greplin), the precursor to Cue, provided the exact same functionality as CloudMagic (across many more services, in fact), but much less quickly.  I would check it every once in a while, just to explore what it could find, but it didn't jump into my life immediately the way CloudMagic did.  The difference -- the magic -- is speed. Thinking about other places where speed has made a difference for me, the one that stands out is [Quicksilver for mac](http://qsapp.com/download.php).  It's another "launcher" app - and I having used it for years now, I can't bring myself to use a computer that doesn't have it.  I can't imagine living without it. Launcher apps, like Quicksilver, CloudMagic, and Brewster, have the potential to use speed to takes this workflow: **Thought -> Find the thing -> Do it** and (in the best case) remove the second step.  They have the ability to bring me from Thought -> Do instantly, and that's a great feeling. Speed is the killer feature, the thing that makes it magic.

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*Originally published on [The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman](https://paragraph.com/@nickgrossman/instant-magic)*