Quicksilver

Quicksilver is a launcher utility that costs $0. That’s a price even a law student can love. Using Quicksilver, you can quickly launch applications and open files. That pretty much sums up what I knew about Quicksilver before I tried it. It sounded interesting, but not necessarily worth my time. After all, Spotlight already does a great job finding things, and I’ve never been really excited about “shortcut” tools. In my experience, they usually require a lot of mental overhead (which I have in limited reserves). Remembering keystroke combinations in QuicKeys, for example, seems like you’re trading fast launching for keystroke setup and memorization.

In spite of my misgivings, I gave Quicksilver a try in early spring. It’s a good thing I did, because I’ve been using it ever since.

How It Works

Quicksilver requires no work up front, and it does much more than launch applications and open files. With Quicksilver you can also find and open bookmarked Web pages in a flash, get to Address Book listings in a flash, find deeply nested folders in a flash, hunt down specific system preferences in a flash, and even open iTunes playlists in a flash. If you’re sensing a theme here, it’s not by accident. Quicksilver lets you do all these things rediculously fast.

As you type a chunk of text into Quicksilver it instantly starts offering results, in a fashion similar to but much faster than Spotlight. While speedy, Quicksilver sometimes produces results you weren’t expecting. However, these unexpected results seem to always show up further down in the search results, after I’ve found what I was trying to find. For example, in the image below, I was looking for my SCU folder.

Quicksilver is great at finding stored Web addresses. It finds pages both by title (the text that shows up at the top of your browser window when you’re at a page) and by the text in a URL. This is handy for finding pages that have a memorable name but a less obvious URL.

Did Someone Say iTunes?

Once you start playing around with Quicksilver, you find all kinds of bonus features you never expected. I felt like quite the power user when I started using Quicksilver to access iTunes playlists. While guru-level management of iTunes playlists won’t necessarily help you study more effectively, it may help you feel a bit more in control of your life. Since law students seldom feel in control of anything, iTunes management via Quicksilver is actually providing a welcome bit of sanity for Mac-using law students. Hey, that’s how I rationalize it.

But Wait, There’s More!

Quicksilver is capable of far more than what I’ve covered here. Its architecture provides modules for many different applications, and you can make them interact with each other from within Quicksilver. For example, I can use Quicksilver to find a file and upload it to the MLS website via the Transmit FTP application. As anyone who has delved into the inner workings of MacOS can tell you, AppleScript has allowed similar functionality for many years. With the advent of Automator, building scripts is easier than ever. Quicksilver, however, provides the advantage of what amount to dozens of prebuilt scripts for commonly-used applications.

A Smooth Interface

Mac users are sticklers for interface, and Quicksilver is very polished. Like the blinking light on the front of a PowerBook and the smooth “genie” effect of the Dock, Quicksilver feels very organic and natural. It doesn’t get in the way, but when you need it, there it is, ready to jump into action. Quicksilver has been called “sleight of hand” – an apt description. Try Quicksilver for yourself to see how it can turn you into a power user.

Other Resources

The Quicksilver Forums are quite active and the developer is extremely responsive.

Dan Dickinson has written excellent beginner and intermediate tutorials. He goes even further into Quicksilver wizardry in this article.