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Quicksilver Tip: Timed Reminders

by Mat Lu Feb 6th 2007 at 11:00AM



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).

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Quicksilver never fails to impress. I just ran across this excellent tip on macosxhints.com for setting little timed reminders to yourself....
 

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Ronoc

Where do you enable Advanced Features? I cannot seem to find it anywhere?

April 13 2007 at 8:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
kevin

Be sure to "Enable Advanced Features" if you can't find Proxy Objects in your catalog!

February 07 2007 at 8:49 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
five|5ths

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.

February 06 2007 at 7:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mystery Man

COOLEST TIP EVER!... really helpful... thanks tuaw!

February 06 2007 at 5:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bucky

@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.

February 06 2007 at 5:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Brendan Sheehan jnr

"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?

February 06 2007 at 2:45 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Allan White

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!

February 06 2007 at 2:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jeff Flowers

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.

February 06 2007 at 2:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Wilbur Pan

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?

February 06 2007 at 1:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Frantz Gauthier

To access Text Mode in Quicksilver, you can also type ' (single quote) after QS invocation. Period don't work for me.

February 06 2007 at 12:46 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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