Idea: having a hotkey, dialog box for searching apps?

["G. Michael Carter" <mikey carterfamily ca>]

There's one scenario with Gnome 3 that's really awkward for me.   And is when F15 is released is going to be awkward for my wife who's taking university classes from home.

I have a video playing in the corner of the screen.   Now I want to take some notes on a scene currently taking place, how do you bring up gedit without the need to pause the video (if the video can be paused at all -- live webcasts don't pause --), open the overview page, type gedit, then come back replay the video and hope the stream didn't die (which would cause me to have to start over and start fast forwarding)

Currently I'm using docky/gnome-do to work around this, but wondered if something could be done in Gnome 3 itself.

One thought I had, would it be possible to have a search that's accessed from the message tray.  

Something like the instant messenger setup?  Hit a key and an instant message type window comes up in the message tray at the bottom of the screen.   Type your search and the applications show as small icons above the window (or something like that).