2004-08-18
LaunchBar and Quicksilver
Tomas Jogin has apparently bought a PowerBook and writes about some first impressions. A few commenters raves about LaunchBar and Quicksilver. I've tried them both, like them both and I'm currently using LaunchBar (mainly because LaunchBar is a bit faster on my machine, or at least it was when I last checked).
There's something with Quicksilver however, that I really like, and that is the ability it gives you to form sentences so to speak. You type a (very short) series of letters and voilą: you've created a mail with a file attached to it and sent it off to a few recipients, and it took you almost no time. Doing the same thing the traditional way would have taken a lot more effort using both mouse and keyboard to switch to the mail application and start a new message, find and attach the file, select recipients, and finally send the message.
If find the concept intriguing. What if the operating system could supply this kind of interface to all applications by default? A Finder on steroids! For example, what if the operating system could remember the name and location of all files recently saved by each and every application? Download a file in your browser, bring up the Quicksilver-like sentence builder, find the downloaded file with a few keystrokes and build up sentence to open it in your favorit editor, mail it to a friend or some colleagues, move or copy it to another disk or folder, and so on. The traditional do-it-with-the-mouse-and-keyboard-way would still be there so noone lose; it's a win-win situation.
There are probably a lot of interesting features based on this simple user interface concept just waiting to be exploited.
