Quicksilver #1
If you love Macs and know nothing about Quicksilver, I won’t preach at you here but I will insist that you at least visit their site and read up a little bit on it because you are honestly missing out on the most powerful utility/app/interface to hit any software platform, ever. Even the Windows community talks about Quicksilver. If they’re talking about it, you should at least know what Quicksilver is. OK, I’m stepping off my box now… let’s get on with it.
What do I have to say about Quicksilver? If you are in any way serious about cranking up your speed and workflow, there are certain plateaus you need to achieve. At risk of getting all zen on yo’ass, it has to be said that you must become one with your computer. There, I said it; now how will you do it?
There is a saying that travels around a bit, “Act, don’t think.” If you are dragging a cursor around your screen with squinted eyes and a furled brow looking for something that is eluding you, then you have obviously never heard of this saying. If you have more hot-key combinations then you do keys on the keyboard, and they are all accessible with just your left hand, then you are fully aware of this mantra. This is, to me, what Quicksilver is all about. It’s all about doing what your brain wants and doing it from one place.
With Quicksilver I will contribute to a handful of blogs, upload images, launch apps, quite apps, work with apps, launch recently opened files, execute scripts, drill into folders without digging, find files without looking, email clients without opening an email client… all of this from one space, from one mindset… and it all starts with one hot-key combo.
The Quicksilver home page eloquently states,
“Quicksilver: A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.”
Think about that for a minute:
“unify – make or become united, uniform, or whole”
“extensible – an architectural property of a program that allows its capabilities to expand”
Whether you apply that to the app itself, you the operator or your workflow, it’s deep no matter what.
I know that familiarity with ones own computer environment is key to increased productivity and an intimate knowledge with ones own operating system and underlying foundation an important part of that. No single workflow should hang in the balance of any operators proficiency with one app, but one week with Quicksilver and you will undoubtedly become more productive at anything you do.
If this article has tweaked your interest at all about Quicksilver, then know there will be more from me.
Also, please take a moment to read articles from other Quicksilver advocates:
Merlin Mann | Dan Dickinson | The Apple Blog | Lifehacker
And spacebar makes click
In my incessant searches for the faster way to do everything, I came across a trick that I had not known in all my years of mastering OS X. Everybody needs a screen shot from time to time right? There are several ways to get one; you can use the Grab.app found in /Applications/Utilitites, or you can use shift-command-3 (full screen), or you can use shift-command-4 (selection by cross-hairs). I don’t like Grab.app. It is cumbersome to dig up and use and it doesn’t save automatically, making the whole process far too long and involved. Shift-command-3 is quick to implement, but trying to work with two dozen 23 inch, full screen grabs in photoshop running through rosetta just to crop down to a single window… even my Mac Pro with 4 GB of ram feels the push. Then there is shift-command-4; quick to invoke but a bit of a pain to line up cross-hairs accurately when you’re in a hurry.
Up until a few days ago, I had not knows of the forth option available to Mac OS X users which is simply this; shift-command-4, then press and release the spacebar. Your cross-hairs are replaced by a camera icon. The icon selects whatever window you are hovering over (turns it blue) and by clicking the mouse on that blue window you take just a window shot that is immediately saved to your desktop. It makes whipping through a pile of window shots quick, easy and painless.
Dvorak iphone home
Unlike the other slightly militant Apple users I tend to read an entire article that John writes and try to sift beyond the hit-baiting, Apple slagging that he tends to do from time to time and actually think hard about what he says. In this article, John tries his hand at a slightly inflammatory dig at Apple and the iPhone and Apples naive approach to the mobile market.
While I can see a great deal of merit behind what John is saying about the tough market that Apple wishes to tackle, I think he makes one gross oversight in regards to the pace at which the mobile fashion trends come and go. For starters, the Motorola RAZR today doesn’t look much different than last year or the year before. And the Blackberry? Hardly lighting fast model releases.
The second retort would be to suggest that perhaps, like the iPod, the iPhone has an esthetic that will stand for one or more years between model releases. It’s not like there is much that can be changed. Most other products in the market simply change their keypads. I am sure before long there will be iPhone GUI themes allowing users to change their iPhone esthetic 6 ways until Sunday on a whim and the touch of a screen.
SCREEECH HALT 1
So I am on my way to PUMP Communications this morning listing to my usual tech-geek podcasts (which are usually a week old by the time I get to them) and made note that a number of the tech-news shows were repeatedly making mention of NBC and News Corp gearing up to take on YouTube. Stop the fricken presses! WHY?! Why would any self respecting, money making company, build a business model that is designed to take out a competitor who MAKES NO MONEY!
YouTube has lived off of venture capital for two years and now they’ve got themselves a sugar daddy with deep pockets, but they still don’t earn their keep. The current YouTube model is hard to monetize. Who better to do it than Google, I agree, but NBC and News Corp will have a tougher time at it since a) people watch YouTube to escape the commercialism of TV and b) I doubt NBC intends to run an Adsense campaign on their proposed video streaming venture.
If you’re going to try to take on any internet media giant, why take on one that actual has a financially viable business model like iTunes? Lets not just look at YouTube and mistake internet traffic for dollar signs.
Copy and paste and copy and paste…
As a web designer it can get pretty tedious, especially if you’re like me and keep an extensive library of code clips and snippets that you like to use to build your projects. No matter what industry you’re in mind you, I am certain you’re familiar with this repetitive operation. It kills me to say this, but Microsoft had this right when they brought this into their Office products, but the trouble there was that it annoyed me more than helped me. For starters, 9 identical icons sitting on a clipboard doesn’t tell me much about what those clips contain.
Anyhoodle, the ability to effectively manage clips and snippets has been sorely missing from most OS’s I’ve used in my geeky career, and I have resorted to a number of embarrassing techniques over the years to compensate (which we have no need to get into here). Along came Macheist… remember that?. I’m all for a good cause and a good bargain so I hopped right on and bought into the hype. Some of the stuff in the bundle is frivolous, some of it I am still trying to find a use for, some of it is downright powerful beyond all description… and then there is iClip.
iClip is one of those apps that shouldn’t be an app; it should be part of the OS. iClip is a brilliant nonintrusive tool that, similarly to your dock, pops in and out when needed to paste in any number of things you’ve recently copied or cut. It just quietly keeps a sequential running tab of your clipping activity in a library or “clip set”. The best part is, you can actually see what’s in those clips, taking the guess work out of the pasting process.
Here’s the real power of iClip… clip sets. Remember those code libraries I constantly pull from? Well instead of pulling them out of excel (which is how I have been managing them as of late), I have added each set of related snippets into a “clip set”. I can quickly switch from clip set to slip set with a hot key and quickly access all the snippets in my library without digging through files and folders. You can also name your individual clips. In my case, many of my oft used snippets are long strings of html code, so naming those clips and displaying their name in in the clip window as opposed to their actual contents makes finding the right one more fail safe.
For more information about this butt whipping speed tool, visit inventive.us.
The BigBox
Well it all comes down to this. Don’t all categories lead to the same place anyhow? Well that’s my view anyhow. One of the biggest speed bumps in my day is digging. No not THAT DIGGING, I mean digging for files. I hate drilling down folder after folder, only to make it to the end of a branch that doesn’t contain what I am looking for.
Don’t get me wrong, I do have a file structure on my hard drive (that’s always in a state of flux), but when I am in need of a regular clip of text or snippet of code or launching an oft used app, I always use either Spotlight or Quicksilver.
So what’s my point? I have decided to forgo the usual “Category” link structure in leu of the BigBox; one of those giant, store everything boxes that contains the whole stinking load. Why? Two reasons:
- It just where my mind is at right now.
- The only Quicksilver script I could find to write post from my desktop only supports posts to the default folder.
How will you/I find anything? With the search field of course. Will this change? I could, but I doubt it.
A new life
This domain has been lifeless for a while now. So it’s time to fill it with the inner workings of my mind as I strive on a daily basis to find the fastest ways to design, develop, entertain and live in the digital world.
So lets start by saying “Hello world!”
More to come.