Blog's from the Bush

QuickSilver (QS) is "A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data"

You can get it here.

Its also:

• an application launcher
• a quick Address look-up tool
• a note taker
• a to-do/calendar event entry tool
• an iTunes controller
• file manipulator
• a beautiful interface tool

And all of these things are part of a single interface and more importantly a single application - this sits well with my experiences of software over the last couple of decades. Don't get me wrong small modules of code that do one thing well are great - and guess what QS is really a framework for exactly that. All things are defined by modules or "plug-ins" and overall they seem to work as defined...

So why isn't everyone using it? I have a few friends that I've tried to push in the QS direction (all of them heavy computer users) but only with limited success. I think my friends don't get it... so I'll try to explain what I find useful about it and hope you get it as a result.

The thing about QS is that you don't have to reach for the mouse, now if you're a high end user you will already have a relatively high level of keyboard competence. Every-time you take your hands away from the keyboard you're slowing down (of course I'm assuming your not using a game, graphics app or other mouse driven piece of software).

Depending on your personal preferences QS can even do a passable Spotlight impersonation but I prefer Apple's implementation.

Quicksilver as a Launcher
Launchers universally provide mouse or keyboard mechanism for launching an application, several of the more advanced offer clusters or groups of applications and documents that can be launched with a single click/keystroke.

The nice thing about QS as a basic launcher is that by default it scan's your Applications directory and automatically indexes it, so launching an application becomes a case of activating <Control-Space> pressing the key for the app you want and then pressing <Return>. For me this means I can start an application launching in as little as half a second (seriously), and, if I want to launch multiple items I simply type a <Comma> between each key.

For example this sequence will launch Safari for me...

<Control Space>
<S>
<Return>

To launch the Safari, NetNewsWire and VoodooPad as in the screenshot above the following sequence will do it...

<Control Space>
<S> <Comma> <N> <Comma> <V>
<Return>

Now the first time you activate QS and press "S" you may not get Safari, but don't worry, QS will learn that you want "S" to be synonymous very quickly. If you pause after typing a letter QS will present a list of matches that it thinks you mean, simply use the down arrow to move through the list until Safari (or the application/file you had in mind) is selected, then press <Return> to open the application/file. Each time you do this, QS will increase the ranking of the file/application until the association between the key and the file is established - most of the time I've only had to activate and select the right item two or three times.

As you can see in the screenshot above QS has underlined the "S" and presented Synchronize! Pro X a the default choice, hmmm not ideal but fixable. If I use the down arrow to move to Safari (as shown in the next screenshot) and then press return, the Safari's association with "S" will increase.

So, the next time I activate QS and type "S" we get the following result:

"But Hang On" I hear you say, what do you do with items that have the same first letter. Well its up to you but there are several approaches you can use thanks to QS's adaptive recognition system. First up, you could associate a completely different letter like "P" (as in Synchronize! Pro) or you could associate multiple keys such as "SY" which is what I've done with Synchronize! Pro - this isn't the limit though, thanks to QS's flexibility you could do many other things but they don't fall under the scope of this post.

Notice in the above screenshot the underlined letters "Sy" and in the selection list Synchronize! Pro is ranked #1 of 320 possible matches, originally iSync used to come up as numero uno but a little training and QS now see's things my way. To paraphrase Mel Brookes "It's good to be the boss"

Ok, if you've read all the way through this post and haven't installed QuickSilver yet then get it here. Jump in and try it, if for nothing else than the launcher features we've covered in this post

Since this had more screenshots that I'd originally envisaged, I'll deal with the rest in another post and we'll hear more of the power of the comma.