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Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

quicksilver

Could Google Quick Search Replace Quicksilver?

Nicholas Jitkoff, who created one of my most used Mac utilities, Quicksilver, now works for Google, which has just released Google Quick Search. I and many other devoted users lamented Nick’s decision to stop development on his popular app. Now we know why he took that step and more importantly have hope that something better than Quicksilver is on the horizon. Lifehacker has provided a nice writeup of the current capabilities, but if you’re in the mood to just grab it and give it a whirl, you can download it on Google Code.

Google Quick Search already contains a lot of the QS functionality, but uses Spotlight for its indexing, which should provide a significant increase in search speed while reducing the processor requirements. Hopefully, by offloading the search indexing to Spotlight, privacy advocates don’t need to worry about Google synchronizing the index of every file to their servers, but I haven’t seen word one way or the other as of yet.

Google Quick Search is young, but promising, and I truly hope it will pick up the Quicksilver banner and advance it.

A Reminder – QuickSilver Style

So, I ran across a little QuickSilver tip which may be old news for the QS power users, but was new to me: QuickSilver is a a great timer for reminders. So, say you need to call someone in 30 minutes, but you don’t want to have to keep monitoring the clock as you are working on a project, writing e-mails etc. You could use a dashboard widget, or a kitchen timer, but why not use QuickSilver? It’s pretty damned easy:

  1. Open QuickSilver (cmd-space) and type a period (.) to open the QS text box
  2. Type your message (Call the restaurant to confirm tonight’s reservation) and hit the tab key to move to the commands pane
  3. The first option is to display as large text, make sure its highlighted and hit ctrl-enterto save that command to be used in conjunction with the next command:
  4. Choose ‘Run after Delay’ or ‘Run at Time’
  5. To have your message appear on screen in half an hour, type ’30m’ (30 minutes) in the box and hit enter.

It take about five seconds to do, and in half an hour, you’ll see a large box reminding you to “Call the restaurant to confirm tonight’s reservation”. Give it a shot, it’s a very useful feature! You can of course use other time options, seconds, hours etc.

Thanks to David Hayes for publishing the tip on his site, where I stumbled across it.