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July 9, 2008

software

You better sit down; Quicksilver is back

Posted Jul. 9, ’08, 5:57 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Software

Quicksilver Quicksilver is one of those iconic pieces of software than can actually fan the flames of platform envy. The ability to press a hotkey and start typing what you want without even being exact is liberating. I personally prefer LaunchBar for several reasons, but one reason was the lack of further Quicksilver updates.

The updates are flowing once again. Alcor has returned and he’s currently in the middle of rewriting Quicksilver’s frameworks. This is great news. Some very innovative things were going on with Quicksilver and its large plugin community.

The comments at 43 Folders seem to indicate this new bug fix version is actually, quite ironically, very buggy. At the same time, the recommendations for LaunchBar are also rolling in there. Anyway, it might be time to revisit it.


8 Comments

Harry Peteroli said:

I don't get this. What's so great about LaunchBar???

I use SpotLight for application launching and searching and I don't need anything else.

July 9, 2008 6:15 AM
herbert68 Author Profile Page said:

http://www.donelleschi.com/sapiens/

It's cool, makes my friends say, "Wow, how'd you do THAT?", activates with a mouse gesture and it lets me simply type anything I want to find.

I tried Quicksilver for a while and really tried hard to like it, but it was just too complicated to use ...

July 9, 2008 6:42 AM
Bill St. Clair said:

I downloaded Quicksilver B56a2 from the link in the article. Quit my trusty B52, and started up the new one. It beachballed, for a good minute before I got bored. Force quit it, but the Finder continued to beachball until I killed it, too. Back to B52.

I'm running 10.5.4 on a late 2006 iMac.

July 9, 2008 6:50 AM
goobimama Author Profile Page said:

I hope they fix up QS. I couldn't install a single plugin after upgrading to Leopard which made it useless to me (given that Spotlight has become good at app launching)

July 9, 2008 7:11 AM
mandaris Author Profile Page said:

I would suggest that you all look at the builds that Ankur (http://lipidity.com) is building. He is also cleaning up the code and is in the process of talking with Alcor about merging his branch with the main branch.

I ask that you don't bug him too much, because I (and a fair amount of others) have been asking him every other day when the next release is going to be out.

You can download his latest version here: http://lipidity.com/software/quicksilver/

July 9, 2008 9:26 AM
Isaac said:
Quicksilver is one of those iconic pieces of software than can actually fan the flames of platform envy. The ability to press a hotkey and start typing what you want without even being exact is liberating.

I agree - I converted to mac because of a video by one of the Ruby on Rails guys. He had Quicksilver and an otherwise very simple elegant setup on his mac.

On the other hand, AppRocket does almost exactly the same thing for Windows, http://www.candylabs.com/approcket/

July 9, 2008 10:00 AM
huxley said:

AppRocket isn't being developed anymore ... Skylight is supposed to be replacing it, but both apps only overlap with some of Quicksilver's basic features & plugins.

July 9, 2008 12:08 PM
Geoff said:

Another vote for LaunchBar. It's way faster than QS was on my old PowerBook.

Here's a list of some nifty features: http://is.gd/1iAI

August 7, 2008 11:37 AM

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