Bye bye Quicksilver. . . for now
Traumatic.
Quicksilver had become an integral part of my ninja-like workflow and apparent speed, I curse myself for becoming so dependant on something in beta.
Now it seems the enterprise has been passed onto the open source community to sort out but who knows how long before they’ll iron out what the author himself describes as a frankensteinein mess which by the sounds of his latest tweet might even be undocumented.
He did a terrific job with it all these years, I wonder why he didn’t chose to profit from this enterprise because many people would have happily paid around £20 for the tiny app which packs a big punch. I’m now left to gather similar functionality for the paid alternative ‘Launchbar‘ which I’m now experimenting with.
Quicksilver had minimized the time between thought and action to new lows and it seems inevitable that such workflow will find its way into operating system design of the future but perhaps I think too much from the standpoint of someone who is obsessed with the keyboard as an IO device when research seems to be pouring into making that obsolete (speech recognition, multi-touch) *strikes off 100wpm from task list*
Leopard spotlight seems to have the unified control pane concept - it already allows you to calculate, dictionary/wikipedia, rapidly conjure up local files etc. so maybe the next release it may add the object verb distinction to allow for a selection of actions to be carried out on the chosen object. For example, once a chosen contact is selected ‘John Smith’, you could then chose to email john, or skype john, etc.
Launchbar currently lacks the global keyboard shortcuts I became so dependent on. Itunes, for example, can not be controlled without application switching or by selecting an applescript but in it’s place I am now using Sizzling Keys
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