After having gotten fed up with Gnome I decided to try XFCE as suggested by most of my Linux-using Twitter friends and I must say, it's a huge improvement.  One thing I missed though was Gome-do's dock launcher.  While I could install Gnome-do in XFCE it would install a ton of required packages and also requires compiz to look normal.  Instead I decided to create a simple and fast dock launcher that needed no extra packages.