Quicksilver!!!

Ok, I haven’t been able to shut up about a program I’ve been using a lot, and no one wants to hear it so I figured I’d post it here. Now…I know maybe 3 people read this blog (2 if you don’t count me) and I’m betting not a single one has a Mac, but I still felt like explaining how much I love this damn program.

When I first got my mac, I heard a lot about quicksilver from everyone so at some point I decided to check out their website http://quicksilver.blacktree.com for reference, and saw this imposing little description…

A unified, extensible interface for working with
applications, contacts, music, and other data.

Does that make sense to you? Cause hell…even now that I use the program I can’t tell you what that means. What I do know is now that I use the program, I don’t know how I’ll be able to use a PC or a different computer without this app. It’s free…it’s powerful…it’s simple…it’s a beautiful thing.

Now let’s get to what it can actually do.

The program is always running in the background, and you bring it up with a little 2 block display with a simple key shortcut. I use cmd+space. It brings up a simple display, that you can download other themes to change the view, but this one is my favorite.

The easiest, most basic use for it is a launcher. I type “fir” and it auto completes to “Firefox” and shows the firefox icon. If it doesn’t auto complete to that, it will list stuff that start with that, and i can choose down to choose the one i wanted. One of the coolest things is that quicksilver learns from you. So at first, it might not have automatically brought up Firefox, but now that I’ve done it often, and haven’t done many other apps that start with “fir” as soon as I hit ‘f’ or ‘fi’ it autocompletes to Firefox. So the programs you use more often will come up quicker. It’s beautiful.

If I’m feeling lazy, and either don’t have my browser open, or don’t feel like opening it, waiting for my home page to load, then typing in the page i want to go to and hit enter, I can simply start typing a url. If it’s either a favorite in your browser, or a page you go to often, you can type just part of the url or the title, for example i’ve been going to http://www.macheist.com a lot, and it automatically chooses it if i just type “Mach” it auto completes to macheist. Or you can enter a full url in for any website, and apparently, if you don’t put the .com it auto adds it. Then you hit enter, and it opens that link in your web browser. Very nice.

Another time saver is in searching websites. If i have something to look up, normally I have to go through the same thing, open the browser, or bring it to the front, wait for the home page to load, go to the site, search, enter, blah blah, with a different plugin I can simply search the same way I brought up a website. To search wikipedia I type “wikip” it auto completes, I hit tab, it’s got “search” selected, and I hit tab to go to the third box and type what I’m searching for. A real time saver I’ve used quite a few times.

You can also control your itunes through it, which is good if you know specifically a song you’re looking for. I was really in the mood to hear a certain song yesterday, so I brought up itunes, searched by artist, hit right, it gave me a list of the cds, hit right and it gave me a list of the songs, and clicking enter played the song. Convenient in that situation where I don’t feel like bringing up itunes and scrolling down or searching for one specific song.

Another pretty neat plugin is radial menus. I type an application that has a lot of options, like itunes and tab over and hit “rad” and it completes to radial menus brining up this display, making it a little more visual to choose what I’m looking to do. I don’t really use this much as I just don’t know what programs are good with it, because clicking the option doesn’t help me…so basically i use it because it’s good eye candy.

Quicksilver also lets you choose files, and bring up Quicksilver to do something with that program, instead of typing in the name and searching for it. You can set up another shortcut, i use opt+space and it loads the file in the first window. In this example I took the qs7 image file and it brings it into the first box, and if it’s a file that has a view it gives you a preview of the file. From there you can choose to open the file, move, copy, delete, anything you want. One of the great ones is the option to mess with images. With an image selected, I can scale it (which I do often), save it as a different file format. For example, for this blog, I took the pictures, which are by default saved as .png files. I selected all those files, typed opt+space to load them into quicksilver (it does all this immediately) then i chose “scale” then hit tab and entered “80%” or whatever size you want, based on percentages, or actual pixel width and height. Another great option I’m working on figuring out is emailing the file. I can bring the file up, choose email” and i get an option to open the email to compose, or to have quicksilver send it automatically. It’s great.

Blah, well there ya go, I just felt like telling someone some of the awesome aspects of this program, and just typed them here for no one to read instead. The great thing about the program is I haven’t even scratched the surface. the program lets me use a longer clipboard (instead of copying something, and pasting, I can copy up to however many I want, it saves them in its own clipboard, then I can go wherever I want to paste parts and choose which saved piece to paste where. if that makes sense. And another powerful option is to set up triggers. Anything you can do with quicksilver you can set up a quick key shortcut to do automatically. For example, I have a folder of Madison photos, say I want a quick way to do a slideshow of them, to show someone, I’d set up a new trigger top choose that folder, then play the slideshow. Then I could set up a key combination I’d remember, like opt+cmd+m and whenever i do that shortcut it automatically launches the madison pictures slideshow. Awesome and very powerful.

god I love this program.