Quicksilver never fails to impress. I just ran across this excellent tip on macosxhints.com for setting little timed reminders to yourself. There are a plethora of little egg timer type applications for OS X, but why bother with one of those when you can do this in Quicksilver? Suppose you want to set a little text reminder like the one above to yourself to go off in 15 minutes. With this little tip you can set Quicksilver to pop up a reminder at any given time, or after any given delay. Big TUAW 'attaboy to mcgraths for discovering this. Read on for a full mini-tutorial.
[Via Digg]
1) Invoke QS, hit period to enter text modes and type your reminder: e.g. "Check Oven," tab now to the second pane and select Large Type.
2) When you hit enter you'll get a large notification as follows (screen shot reduced):
3) Here's the cool bit: now invoke QS again, and in the first pane type "last," and select "Last Object," hit the right arrow and your last command "Check Oven" (Large Type) should appear.
4) Tab to the second pane and choose Run after Delay... or Run at Time... This will reveal the third pane, tab to it, and type in the delay (e.g. 45s or 30m or even 3m 30s) or the time (e.g. 7:15pm) as appropriate.
5) now at the time you specified (or after the delay you specified), the notification as in step two will pop up.
A few notes: For this to work you must have proxy objects in your catalog, which means you must "Enable Advanced Features" in the QS Preferences. In addition, you can interleave reminders if you choose one with remind at time, and the other with remind after delay (when I tried to interleave two reminders after Delay it didn't work for some reason). Finally, you can use the same trick to run any command, not just Text (Large Type).
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
2-06-2007 @ 11:35AM
Geoffrey said...
Thanks for the tutorial. Is there a website or blog that has a list of some of the cooler (an useful) things you can do with QS (with tutorials). I am a relatively new Macbook user and very new QS user and going through all the possibilities can be somewhat overwhelming.
Thanks
Geoffrey
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 11:42AM
jopari said...
yet another reason why quicksilver is amazing. this is the easiest timer app i've found yet.
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 11:43AM
asw said...
why can't i see the "Last Object" command in my QS?
-a-
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 11:43AM
Biffo said...
Geoffrey, try here:
http://mysite.verizon.net/hmelman/Quicksilver.pdf
Its work in progress, but all the basic stuff is covered well, and there are some good tips for more advanced users as well.
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 11:44AM
Biffo said...
By the way, I didn't write it, I just find it useful...
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 11:48AM
Geoffrey said...
Thanks biffo, that was what I was looking for.
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 11:52AM
Howard Melman said...
You can skip step 3 by using control-enter instead of enter in step 2. Instead of running the command, it builds a "command object" and selects it in the first pane.
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 11:52AM
Rafael said...
There is also an easier way to do this thing. Just enter text mode in the first field, then tab to the second field, choose the large type action and then press ctrl-return instead of return. This will give you the "Run after delay..." etc. options in the last field. If you choose one of them you can simply write the time in natural language, like described above (10 seconds, 2 minutes etc.)
This is mentioned in the whole Quicksilver guide, which you already mentioned in an earlier post (http://www.tuaw.com/2007/01/18/melman-quicksilver-users-guide/). So don't repeat yourself ;)
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 11:53AM
Rafael said...
Oh yeah, I forgot... I also don't have a Last Object.
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 11:56AM
Pete Clark said...
asw - you need to have "proxy objects" enabled in your catalog. Go to Catalog in the preferences window, and then in the "quicksilver" item on the left, make sure that Proxy Objects is selected.
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 12:02PM
Simon Iannelli said...
Great! Is there any way to put the mac to sleep with quicksilver? Like this I could put it to sleep with a delay!
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 12:28PM
Tom said...
ytrewq1 one of the main contributors of 3rd party Quicksilver plugins made a plugin which makes this even easier. The timer actions plugin (which depends on the pyObjC plugin) is available at http://quicksilver.infogami.com/PyObjCPluginsUniversalDev
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 1:08PM
Frantz Gauthier said...
To access Text Mode in Quicksilver, you can also type ' (single quote) after QS invocation. Period don't work for me.
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 1:21PM
Wilbur Pan said...
I got this up and running, and it is cool, but I found it much easier to set an appointment in iCal with an alarm. Is there an advantage to using Quicksilver for this purpose that I'm missing?
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 2:25PM
Allan White said...
Ok, so I found how to enable "Last Object":
Prefs > Catalog > Quicksilver (along the left side) > Proxy Objects (check)
I can't seem to get the "run at x" command after getting last object.
It would have been nice to see this info in the original post (grumble). But hey, I'm glad you posted it!
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 2:25PM
Jeff Flowers said...
You could also accomplish something like this with Growl, which supports command line scripting. It wouldn't be as ad hoc as this QS hint, but if you already have Growl installed and not QS, it might be an idea.
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 2:45PM
brendan Sheehan jnr said...
"Prefs > Catalog > Quicksilver (along the left side) > Proxy Objects (check)"
Proxy objects isn't there for me? Do you have to download it or something?
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 5:31PM
Bucky said...
@Allan White
It stumped me for a while too; you have to type 'last' for last object, and then use right curser key to actually select the last object. It should then show you the text you typed.
You should now be able to tab to the next to the second pane, and 'run' is the first command. Just use right/down curser key to open option and highlight 'Run after...'.
Tab again so that you can type in the time/delay and it should work for you.
Reply
2-06-2007 @ 8:25PM
five|5ths said...
You can use this to do anything that QS can do. You can run apps at certain a time, open webpages, launch playlists/songs, etc....im using it to open a webpage in the morning when i wake up so that I can see the current weather.
Im not an heavy applescript guy...but if you are im guess you can use it to do alot of stuff.
Reply
2-07-2007 @ 4:39AM
Mystery Man said...
COOLEST TIP EVER!... really helpful... thanks tuaw!
Reply