A few weeks ago our pal Andrew Huff from Chicago’s Gapers Block brought a few guys over to our office to give us a demo of some software they were working on. Andrew is handling their PR.

The guys were Atul Varma and Aza Raskin of Humanized — a small Chicago start-up focused on making desktop software simpler and less frustrating. They are sharp. Their philosophy is much like ours. We’re fans.

The demo we got was for a new product called Enso. It’s Windows only so they brought their laptops.

Enso is a launcher — much like Launchbar or Quicksilver on the Mac. Although Enso has some more tricks up its sleeve. Enso has a nice style about it too. It’s tastefully executed.

Hold down the caps lock key, type, and stuff happens. You can add up numbers, spell check a sentence, open a document, look something up with Google, get a word count of any block of text, define any word anytime, etc. They even demoed how it could work with Basecamp, although I don’t know if that feature made it into their final release.

Once you get the hang of it it’s probably something you can’t imagine being without. That’s how Launchbar is for me — when I use a Mac that doesn’t have Launchbar of Quicksilver I feel like I’m stuck in the past.

To start Enso comes in two parts: Launcher and Words. You can use them together or separately. Walt Mossberg wrote it up today in The Wall Street Journal. Not a bad way to launch.

If you have a PC, and you value your time and like to avoid frustrating common tasks, you should definitely check out Enso over at the Humanized site.