At MBF! we love gadgets and toys and new things promising to help us improve performance. Organizers, planners, systems, perspectives, philosophies; we’ve got our fingers in every pie on the sill.
Why it took us 1,440 mentions at 43 Folders to notice Quicksilver we have no idea, but it’s evidence that we’re far from the early adopters we like to imagine ourselves.
It’s like a brand new pair of running shoes for your OS X.
Developer Blacktree says “at first glance, Quicksilver is a launcher.” That doesn’t do it justice, and though accurate, doesn’t even hint at what this app has under the hood. They also call it “a unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.” A little more to the point, but doesn’t quite give you an understanding of what it can do.
Quicksilver helps merge OS X with your subconscious.
Anything but mercurial, launching applications and performing all kinds of functions becomes as transparent as touch typing.
Hot keys on steroids.
Imagine not needing to memorize hot keys to launch and perform functions within the program you just launched. Think of a bookmark, type the first couple of letters and the bookmark is there in front of you, hit return and the page is there. Think of a song or artist in your iTunes, type a few letters, the song is there, hit return and it’s playing. (It’s several orders of magnitude faster than using iTunes search and scroll, especially if you have tens of gigs of music.) Want to zip up a bunch of files and data into a nice package? It’s a few simple keystrokes; you may never juggle Finder windows again. Search contacts without going to whatever program they’re stored in. Compose and send e-mail without pointing and clicking. It may save you time, but you probably won’t notice that as you’ll just be more efficient. You’ll see your desktop less as it starts acting like the extension of your psyche you’ve been trying to get it to be for years.
This is a must-have for Mac users. There may be one or two out there who are so visually oriented that they will not immediately benefit from the swiftness of an intuitive letter-key interface (if you always would rather use a mouse than a keypad). But try it first. Take the three minutes to download and install, and then give yourself another ten to run through Dan Dickinson’s A better OS X in just 10 minutes before deciding. The rest of you won’t need to decide–you’ll be running through the other possibilities and tweaking the plug-ins to customize Quicksilver to your needs. Then you’ll be using it. And you’ll be getting things done faster, you’ll have more time, and you’ll feel better.
(Sorry Windows and Linux users–Quicksilver is a Mac app.)
And it’s free!
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