Quicksilver, First Impressions

I’ve played a little with Quicksilver this morning, a small app launcher for Mac OS X (via Erik Benson). My first impression was that it was a clone of LaunchBar, as you launch apps (and more) by hitting Command-space and typing an abbreviation. But Quicksilver very cleverly builds upon the LaunchBar paradigm to include actions.

The above is the result of typing Command-space, S, A, F, Tab, O, W, Tab, S, E, to create the phrase “Safari open with Script Editor” (opens its script terminology). The default action of course is “Open,” so hitting Return after the first abbreviation would launch Safari, exactly as in LaunchBar.

There are many actions, and Quicksilver indexes lots of things. For instance, if I type an abbreviation of someone’s name, I can combine phrases such as “John Doe email item Genres.pdf,” resulting in the file being emailed to John Doe (found either in my Address Book or among my previous recipients in Mail). This feature reminds me of segusoLand, which introduces a concept called “reciprocal list narrowing.”

The only thing I don’t like is the different look of dialogs in Quicksilver, with gradient fills as background, lines separating cells in tables, meaningless transparency, etc. This is only, I feel, a question of having a different look. The new things doesn’t mean anything to the user, as is the case for the new things invented by Omnigroup in OmniGraffle Pro, and by David Watanabe in Acquisition, to name two very good examples.

Anyway, besides being an app launcher, it has pasteboard history, and a shelf I haven’t understood quite what it’s for yet. And it’s obvious that this app is going places. Nicholas Jitkoff, the developer behind Quicksilver, promises that “The core functionality of QS will be open source.” I hope this will only induce healthy competition and not completely destroy the market for LaunchBar, a shareware app I gladly paid for.