I was reminded yesterday of a little gem of an app, Nocturne, from QuickSilver creator, Alcor of Blacktree Software. I don’t know that I had ever used this one in the past seeing as it seemed a bit of a duplication of what was possible already in the Universal Access pref pane (white text on black). There is a difference, however, as I learned yesterday after downloading and installing it.

While the Universal Access route will just flip the colors into a perfect negative to what’s on screen, Nocuturne allows you to tweak a few of the colors and even offers some basic hue correction. This is important to me since I am fairly used to my syntax colors in TextMate and by using the hue correction in Nocturne I was able to maintain some familiarity with the code as I was used to seeing it.

I have since become reliant on Nucturne and have spent most of today working in night time mode.

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One aspect of my job in web design and theme design is having to look up web sites and online resources constantly. So here are a three tricks I’ve dug up, which was not easy since Quicksilver documentation is few and far between.

1. Select, Grab and Search

• For this one you need to set a few obscure and not so well documented features.
  • First of you’ll need to activate the “Services Menu Module” in Quicksilver > Plug-ins > All Plug-ins > System. This allows for the “Search With Google – A service of Safari.app” action,
  • Next you need to add some extra function to Quicksilver by “Enabling advanced features”,
  • Another useful setting will be “Pull selection from front application instead of Finder” from Quicksilver > Preferences > Extras,
  • For Path Finder users, you’ll also need to enable the Path Finder module (Quicksilver > Plug-ins > All Plug-ins > Applications) and then make Path Finder you default file browser (Quicksilver > Preferences > Handlers > File System Browser > Path Finder).
  • relaunch Quicksilver.
• Once you’ve managed this much, you only need to:
  • select any text from anywhere text is selectable,
  • invoke Quicksilver (^space for most),
  • press “⌘g”,
  • tab to the action panel,
  • type “sw” (which should result in “Search With Google” or will after one or two uses) and hit return.
• You’re selected text now turns up as a google query in Safari.

2. Select and search

• To take the above idea one step farther (and this comes courtesy of one commenter on my last Quicksilver post), we can make a trigger that invokes Quicksilver, grabs the selection in the command window and tabs over to the action window all in one hot-key:
  • first you need to enable the “Command With Selection” trigger in Quicksilver > Triggers > Quicksilver,
  • select the trigger and tap the “i” button and the bottom of the window
  • edit the hot key and enter “⌘esc” (or a hot-key of your choice)
• Now you can selecting anything selectable, tap “⌘esc” and immediately type “sw” to bring up “Search With Google” and press return and… well you know what happens.
• Incidentally, this hot-key can be used to grab a selection to be modified in any manner; select an image, “⌘esc”, type “ow” (Open With), tab, type “pr” (Preview.app). Or select a URL, “⌘esc”, hit return to open that URL, and so on… here are some other examples.

3. Type and search

• What if you could just type from anywhere and have Google look it up for you? Well here is a cool trigger for doing just that. If you haven’t done so already:
  • activate the Web Search Module (Quicksilver > Plug-ins > All Plug-ins > Web)
  • activate the “Web Searches (from docs.blacktree.com)” catalog (Quicksilver > Catalog > Modules)
  • Hit the refresh button at the bottom of that window
• Create a web search trigger:
  • invoke Quicksilver and type “ws”, it should yield “Web Search” (if not, arrow over and down until you see it). The default service is “http://www.google.com/search?q=***” and this is the one you want,
  • tab to the action panel, it should default to “Search For…” but if not type “sf”,
  • tab to the target or 3rd panel and enter some text,
  • now tap “⌘’” to bring up Quicksilver > Triggers
  • click the “+” button at the bottom of the window
  • your command, action and target should already be propagated but there will be text in the target panel. Get rid of that text by selecting it and typing “⌘x”
  • click “save”
  • then select the “i” button near the bottom and edit the hot-key by entering “⌘2″ (my personal preference because of the relationship to the @ symbol).
• To use this trigger, simply tap “⌘2″ from anywhere, in any app and Quicksilver will prompt you with a text field. Type your query in and press return. Safari will pop up and serve the google results for the term you just typed into Quicksilver.

I hope this little how-to was useful to you. Bookmark it, Digg it or do whatever it takes to keep track of this permalink because you never know when you’ll need it.

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There is often a problem with that. Double clicking or command+O on a file opens it in it’s default app. Right+clicking or control+clicking the file to open the contextual menu then “open with” can be a pain (and slow) depending on the number of apps you run on your system. Opening the app and then browsing through the “Open file” function is too much like work. And finally, dragging the app onto a desktop icon is open useful if you keep everything you ever use in you dock at all times (which I don’t).

So in my ever lasting pursuit of the fastest way around these little hold-ups, I have come to rely on QuickSilver to, once again, saves the day. I use quicksilver to quickly and painlessly open any file with any app I choose and it all takes a few keystrokes and a few seconds:

1. Find the file you want to open, like an image (which, for me, opens with Photoshop by default),
2. Invoke QuickSilver (command+space in most cases, command+esc for me),
3. Start typing the name of the app you want to open your file with, like Preview.app for instance,
4. Once you app pops up in the first panel (with 2 or 3 keystrokes), simply drag your file onto the pane (like you would onto a dock icon),
5. POOF! The file opens in the app you want and not the files default app.

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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

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1. It just where my mind is at right now.
2. 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.

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