Magic Index is currently a simple form for installing Drupal sites as subdirectories of a root virtual host on a local development server. At the very least, you'll need a LAMP stack, drush, and drush_make to get started. If you develop on a Gnu/Linux machine (preferably Ubuntu) and have inotify-tools installed, it will also automatically chown your site directories after they are installed so that Eclipse can create a new PHP project at the site's location using the site's existing source.
The long-range plan is to grow this into a full-featured Module, then later into an Install Profile that can itself be installed using the original Magic Index form itself. A developer will then be able to use her local Magic Index site to manage all of her other local Drupal development installations. Think Aegir's site-management capabilities, but for isolated local Drupal installs. In fact, the big idea is that a developer will be able to use her local Magic Index site to install, upgrade and backup her other local isolated Drupal development sites, which can then be migrated to Aegir for deployment. But all that is a long way off. For now, it's just a simple web form for installing sites locally.
Why not Acquia Dev Desktop, Quickstart or Drubuntu?
As far as I can tell there's no reason anybody would ever want this, but I had a site that I unfortunately deployed on 7.x-alpha6 and it had been sitting there all this time, so I had to wrap my mi