Quicksilver ?51 Available

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity, Freeware

Quicksilver ?51 Available

by Jay Savage Sep 6th 2006

Quciksilver, the popular, perpetually in googlebeta "unified, extensible interface" for OS X has been updated to β51. If you haven't seen the little update screen yet, you will soon. The update is mostly bugfixes for the core plugins; It looks like all of them got overhauled. More interesting is the release note that build 3800, a.k.a. β51, is "Final Tweaks," capital F, capital T. Does that mean the next version will be a release? I hope so. The developers have put a lot of work--3800 builds and counting--into this little gem and, while I've enjoyed the free downloads, they deserve to make a little money off it.

For those of you who aren't sure what a unified, extensible interface is, it's difficult to explain. In it's most basic form, it provides keyboard shortcuts for application launching. You hit CTRL-Space at any time, type the first few letters of an application name, and it launches. With the core plug-ins, it can be tweaked to use to also find files through spotlight, mail, Address Book contacts, and even iPhoto photos. That's pretty powerful. The really nifty part, though, is the "extensible" bit. Authors can write plugins for virtually anything, allowing you to tie almost anything, from system events to Automator actions to keystrokes and other triggers to control everything from your destop picture to your GMail. Think of it as Mission Control for your Mac.

Tags: application launcher, ApplicationLauncher, Quicksilver

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

mouser said 1:15PM on 9-06-2006

there are severeal Windows alternatives to Quicksilver, including Find+Run Robot (free):
http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/findrun/index.html

(Help file has a comprehensive list of alternative programs as well)

Qwfwq said 8:11PM on 9-07-2006

@mouser
Your Find+Run Robot is a great little program, without question the best of its kind in Windows and the closest we can have to Quicksilver's functionality, but it still lags behind it. Nevertheless I think that it merits a more detailed coverage here on DLSQ so that more Windows'users become aware of it.

Jay Savage said 10:39AM on 9-08-2006

we've already covere Find and Run Robot here, as well as Colibri and SlickRun, that I know of.

Qwfwq said 2:47PM on 9-08-2006

Yes, you're absolutely right, my mistake for not remembering it.

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