Lifehacker interview on the future of Quicksilver
Today's Lifehacker interview with Quicksilver developer Nicholas Jitkoff (a.k.a. Alcor) has struck a note of gloom into the holiday spirits around TUAW's home office (currently located in an unoccupied storefront of the West Edmonton Mall). While Nicholas is still planning to do what he can to improve stability for the existing b54 branch of QS, the road is less clear for future feature development; he doesn't have the time in his off hours to advance the wildly popular launcher to the next level, and the existing version meets his needs (other than the problem of stability). His words: "that branch is condemned to a long slow death," and "I'm inclined to encourage users to move over to the more stable and well supported alternatives like LaunchBar." Ouch!
This, of course, means an opportunity for some eager young guns to show the world what they can do with the source code to QS, available to one and all. The open source version of QS might never attract the attention and plug-in support of the original, but in the right hands... well, you never know. Visit the Google Code page to get involved with the trunk version of QS, and check out Nicholas' Google Tech Talk video on QS for more behind-the-scenes info. Reader Martin also points to one programmer who is already diving in and cleaning up the b54 code.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Joost de Valk said 4:47PM on 12-06-2007
If some coder goes off and builds it, I'll happily help in setting up a community blog, forum and whatever else is necessary for it!
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Mat Lu said 6:13PM on 12-06-2007
Dude, this sucks. Doesn't this guy know he needs to spend countless hours working for no money so I can have may favorite Mac utility! I hope somebody like Ankur (Vacuous Virtuoso) picks this up.
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elcaifo said 6:13PM on 12-06-2007
Nooooooo don't let QS die!!!!
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Radii said 6:50PM on 12-06-2007
I just got to express my deep sorrow... Quicksilver is just the better application I've ever used, and it is the reason why I love my Mac. I do EVERYTHING with Quicksilver...
Please, someone with symbolic power into the Mac community (as Merlin Mann, Ethan Schoonover, I don't know...), do something to save Quicksilver.
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agnoster said 7:08PM on 12-06-2007
Just a quick nitpick for future reference:
1. It's spelled "née" - the accent is on the first e.
2. "née" is for females. For a male you would use "né".
3. "né" is from the French, and means "born as" - it is used to reference someone's born name, most commonly in the case of someone who has taken their spouses name. For instance, if Mary Smith married Joe Blogg and took his last name, she might be referred to as "Mary Blogg (née Smith)". This is also why you rarely see "né" and usually "née" - because it is more common in our society for a woman to take her husband's last name.
In the words of Inigo Montoya, "you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Instead, I would recommend trying "a. k. a." - I think that's what you were after, considering he was not born with the name Alcor, but rather chose it as a handle.
Back on subject, though, I think that the new experimental stuff he's working on will bear some very interesting fruit. Quicksilver helped us re-imagine how we might interface with our computers, marrying the GUI and the CLI in an innovative way. I'm fairly certain that wherever his inspiration leads next will certainly be interesting to see, and perhaps often something as paradigm-shifting as the original Quicksilver has been.
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Michael Rose said 9:15AM on 12-07-2007
I feel edified, and somewhat humbled. Thanks for the French lesson! Post fixed.
geochick said 7:17PM on 12-06-2007
I know you guys love QS but I can use spotlight as an app launcher in Leopard, plus look up a word in the dictionary, plus do some quick calculations... I won't be missing QS very much at all.
LOL
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Chad said 7:46PM on 12-06-2007
Quicksilver does a lot more than that, although for casual use that will suffice.
But for people who like to do more and keep hands on the keyboard, you can't replace quicksilver with spotlight. For example, with quicksilver I can type some text and email it, add it to my todo list, save it to a file, add it to my calendar, etc etc. All without touching the mouse or switching applications. I can find files and upload the to flickr, email them as attachments, ftp them, copy/move/delete them, etc etc. It's fairly powerful and for those of us who use the more powerful features, you can't really replace it with anything else.
Radii said 9:15PM on 12-06-2007
I can't do the following with Spotlight :
- Add notes to almost every note taker.
- Add events to iCal
- View and edit Address book contacts
- Send email
- Move, copy, rename, show, reveal... files
- Add actions to OmniFocus or iGTD
- Search into my scrapbook database (Yojimbo)
- Tag files
- Do advanced Internet search queries
- Trigger actions by hotkeys
- Access to every menu items of every application (via show menu items and proxies)
- Copy and paste text between apps
- Launch more than one application at the same time (same query)
- Browse Safari bookmarks
- Browse iTunes library
- Browse iPhoto library
- Even browse the Finder
- Search into my del.icio.us bookmarks
- And a lot of many more.
That's why I think that the "slow death" of the current branch of QS and the impossibility of a stable version of the new branch, is so sad for many Mac users.
iGO said 7:33PM on 12-06-2007
I am currently running v b53.
Is there something wrong/unstable with the newer b54?
Wanted to upgrade but not if there are issues.
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windycitypoe said 7:57PM on 12-06-2007
I'm not too worried. Quicksilver is very beloved, and it's now open source. It's not going to die from neglect.
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Manny said 8:44PM on 12-06-2007
I would gladly pay as well. I hope someone picks this up and continues to develop it, the Mac community is indebted to this developer for such a useful app.
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snostorm said 11:09PM on 12-06-2007
As much as I love(d) quicksilver, at one point it was causing my system to be fairly unstable. As 90% of what I used it for was launching, spotlight (Leopard) has filled that gap for me. There will always be a soft spot in my heart for the app, so I'd like to see it stabilize and live on for a long time to come.
Also: kudos on the shout out to West Edmonton Mall. I hope Team TUAW is here on a secret mission to convince the owners of the mall to beg (and bribe?) Apple in to opening a store here soon.
So what's the deal, is it an ongoing joke to make TUAW headquarters somewhere random each time it is mentioned, or is one of the team (M. Rose) actually based in Edmonton now?
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Michael Rose said 9:18AM on 12-07-2007
Snostorm -- yes, the wandering home office is my little gag, a tribute to David Letterman's movable Late Night home office. I've been to the WEM though -- an overwhelming retail experience and certainly deserving of an Apple store.
starwxrwx said 11:41PM on 12-06-2007
The current version works fine for me, what's the big deal? New useful scripts and plugins are probably more important from here on out.
Long live QS!
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matthew said 1:18AM on 12-07-2007
Why fork? Just participate in the project.
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Michael Rose said 5:43PM on 12-06-2007
Thanks for pointing that out, Matthew -- I mischaracterized the project, and I've updated the link to the Google Code page. The trunk version of QS is the active development branch, and the current build is deprecated.
Churry said 2:09AM on 12-07-2007
Say it ain't so! I would fork over money so fast if he needs to start charging for QS.
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Martin said 5:25AM on 12-07-2007
Check out this dude who's cleaning up the the Quicksilver code: http://lipidity.com/apple/cleaning-up-quicksilver
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Michael Rose said 9:17AM on 12-07-2007
Thanks, Martin -- added to the post.