i need help figuring out what program this is...

Perhaps your friend was talking about Quicksilver or Butler? Both programs allow you to set universal shortcuts for accomplishing tasks. I'm not as familiar with Butler, as I use Quicksilver, but from what I know they are relatively similar.

As far as Quicksilver goes, it's rather nice to be able to hit a shortcut while in any application and bring up the Quicksilver window and type in part of the name of virtually anything, and have it come up. Quicksilver is also able to be used to streamline certain repetitive tasks, but I don't use that feature as much. I primarily use it as a launcher.

 

if you're talking about safari, then yeah. there are a couple that do that, iirc, but the one I use is part of Saft (find the link somewhere on pimpmysafari.com).

I have "g" go to google.com, "mail" go to my gmail, "/." for slashdot, etc.