It’s beginning to click in. When my friend first sent me a list of apps I really need to have for my Mac, I took a look at the Quicksilver site and just didn’t get it. I simply skipped over the tool and went on to the next.
A little later, I decided to take a minute to download it and play with it after yet another recommendation. I ran it, hit ctrl-space, launched Firefox or something, said cool, and closed it, and forgot about it again.
After yet another recommendation, I decided to enable it to start automatically, and force myself to figure out what the buzz was all about. Now I keep 16 applications in my dock counting the finder and the dashboard. This means that the countless dozens of other applications and utilities that I have stashed in my applications and utilities folders are not quickly available.
Quicksilver is an incredibly efficient application launcher. The problem is that calling it an application launcher not only belies it’s complexity, it’s down right insulting. This tool is the Swiss Army Knife of the OS X operating system. I would be surprised if Steve Jobs himself hasn’t contacted the author about incorporating it into Leopard.
To illustrate this point, I used it to find out how to create the very screen capture I used to illustrate the use of it….wrap your brain around that. (Still a new Mac user, don’t have all these funky key strokes memorized yet <cmd-shft-4> if you’re curious) It’s also important to note that there is yet another plugin for Quicksilver to do this same thing.
So this shows you how I can create all sorts of catalogs, use actions against them, and specify parameters to augment them. In this case I have a bookmark for a Google Search, I typed ctrl-space to bring up Quicksilver, typed Go tab to bring up Google and se tab to specify Search For…, and finally OS x screen grab to tell Google what to search. You may ask how it knew what bookmark to choose if I have several. Quicksilver actually learns and defaults to what you use most, a quick down arrow will show all available options that match the expression you typed.
Now let me show you something even cooler, in this example (which I have forced nearly everyone I could find to watch) I will located a jpg, attach it to an email, and address it to Dawngrrl with just a few keystrokes. Watch this!
- ctrl-space to launch Quicksilver
- geek to bring up the geekbag.jpg file I have in my documents folders
- co to get to Compose Email…
- and finally Da to bring up Dawn Fink from my contacts
The result looks like this…
and when I hit enter, the Entourage new mail is open with an addressed and attached message. All this with only 11 keystrokes counting the tabs.
Are you starting to get it? Let’s take a look at what some of these other plugins can do.
- The Calculator Module allows you to perform quick and still complex mathematical computations from the Quicksilver interface. Just type = and start creating an expression.
- The Cyberduck Module allows you to FTP files to book marked servers without even launching Cyberduck.
- The Dictionary Module pulls up quick definitions in a clear and concise manner, no more browsing to Dictionary.com.
- The Flickr Upload module allows you to find files and send them to your Flickr Account quickly and easily.
- The Image Manipulations Actions allow you to resize and convert images any way you want without having to load Photoshop or iPhoto…nice!
- The iTunes Module lets you browse and play music from your iTunes library without having to load the application first.
- The Web Search Module lets you quickly search nearly any web site by creating a simple custom bookmark for it (Example above).
These are just a few of the many plug ins. The architecture is obviously very extensible and continues to grow.
I am excited to say that this is not all. I haven’t even begun to dig into proxies and triggers. These allow you to do even more advanced things like work with objects such as selections or clipboard data. I will add more on this later.
All in all I have to say, if you use a Mac, you need this application. I have been buzzed about it for days. I can truly see how this will really change the way I use a computer.
