In this posting, I want to home in on exactly where productivity lives on the Mac by highlighting four specific applications for you to use. (I’ve only got space to describe one in detail here – more tomorrow.)
Before I do that I’d like to explain something that, if you understand it, really helps in being productive on the Mac. The Mac interface is a set of “objects” in the object-oriented sense of the term. Practically what that means – if you’re a geek – is that you can link applications together and automate them at almost any level granularity. Which means:
Almost anything you can do with the mouse or the keyboard in any application can be scripted and run automatically.
Now you may not even know what that means, but bear with me for a moment. It means that if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool geek, you can automate the hell out of the Mac, and because of that, a number of dyed-in-the-wool geeks have done so. And some of them have even done you great favors. They have built applications that allow you to automate quite a lot on the Mac even if you’re bereft of any geek genes.
Four such applications are:
- QuickSilver
- iKey
- Journler
- AppleScript
Right now you need to know why these applications are important, and what they do. I’ll cover Quicksilver in this post and the others in subsequent posts.
QuickSilver: Subject -> Action -> Target
In a previous post, I urged readers to get QuickSilver, download it and use it as an application launcher. But there are choices of app launchers and QuickSilver is just one option. If launching is all you’re interested in you may prefer DragThing or LaunchBar. QuickSilver is a great deal more than an application launcher, it is a highly effective automation capability. I’d go as far as to say that QuickSilver is:
the productivity hub of keyboard-based usage of the Mac
The fact that QuickSilver is free is almost an absurdity. I’ve paid an awful lot of money for software that’s not a quarter as useful as QuickSilver. If you want to be really productive on the Mac then you need QuickSilver. It’s as simple as that. QuickSilver actually changes the way that you use the Mac, because it allows you to do most things from the keyboard – and as I’ve said before, the keyboard beats the mouse almost every time as far as productivity is concerned. There is no other product like QuickSilver on the Mac or on any other platform (as far as I’m aware). However, QuickSilver has one drawback: there is no quick-start-for-the non-geek-guide that tells you how to get going fast and do useful stuff.
I’m hoping to help in this. First you need to understand what QuickSilver is.
QuickSilver is an in-the-background program, that keeps an indexed catalog of all the files you use and create. It stays hidden unless you call it up with the hotkey that you have designated. When you call it up, you can type a few letters and when you stop typing (it may be one letter or several, it presents you with a list of the things you might have been looking for.
If you look at the adjacent screenshot of my computer, the top window displayed is the QuickSilver input area. This appeared when I typed the hotkey (I use Command Spacebar). Then, when it typed “di” thhe second window appeared giving a list of the items QuickSilver thinks I may have wanted – with the first window changing to show the icon of what was top of the list.
Note how varied this list is. It’s doesn’t just show applications that you might want to launch, this one also shows a Unix command that begins with “di” that I might want to enter into Terminal, and the subsequent item is a URL that I might want to visit. You can define all the kinds of items you want QuickSilver to track and it will do so.
Now notice the gray spot next to each item. If you click on that, you can tell QuickSilver to promote that item to be top of the list when you type “di” and it will make it so. So if you clicked on the gray spot for the Digg url and told QuickSilver to increase its importance then whenever you invoke QuickSilver and type in “di”, then Return, it will launch the browser and take you to Digg. In the normal course of events you don’t need to do this because QuickSilver tracks what you select, promoting the things you select more frequently towards the top of the list. However, when you use the gray spot, you fix a keyboard combination, “di” in this case, to a particular “subject”.
If QuickSilver only did this for you it would be impressive. You could create keyboard shortcuts not just to launch applications, but to enter Unix commands in Terminal, bring up web pages in your favorite browser, open up folders, open a file in its default application and so forth. That’s a host of different things beside starting an application and – is your head spinning? – it might seem confusing at first. But there is a simple semantic pattern that governs QuickSilver’s behavior. It’s this:
Subject – then Action – then Target.
If you just want to open something, then you enter the “subject” and then Return. If it’s the name of an application QuickSilver launches it, if it’s a URL QuickSilver finds it, if it’s a file, QuickSilver opens it with an application, and so on.
But let’s imagine you want to send the file Test.Doc by email to Jim. Here’s how to do it:
- Invoke QuickSilver and enter “test” that is guaranteed to find the file wherever it is.
- Then hit Tab and enter “mail”, and QuickSilver will probably select the “email to” action (there’s a limited number of actions that can be done to a file).
- Now hit Tab and enter “jim”. QuickSilver will go to your address book and give you a list of everyone with “jim” in their name.
- Select the Jim you want and hit return and QuickSilver will create an email with the attached file ready to send to “jim”. The email window will appear and all that remains for you to do is “send”.
Please try this. It will help you get going with QuickSilver.
That’s all I have to say about QuickSilver right now. Tomorrow I’ll introduce iKey.
Click on this link: PDQ Mac to see a list of other postings on Apple Mac productivity.
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