Beta beat: Silverflow Quicksilver interface

Julius Eckert has made splashes at TUAW before, namely for his Bezel HUD and Showcase interfaces for Quicksilver. Now he's released a beta of his much-anticipated Silverflow interface (inspired by designer Jono). The Cover Flow thing may be played out for some, but I'm finding this interface to be both elegant and useful.

I'll admit that I've gone from a die-hard user to watching Quicksilver from the sidelines, mostly due to crashes I was experiencing with it since upgrading to Leopard. I'll also admit that I had high hopes for further development when the developers made it open source and have been a little disappointed. But Silverflow has rekindled my interest and after loading Quicksilver back up to try it out, I quickly remembered all of the extra reasons I had for preferring it to Spotlight. Whether you're a current Quicksilver user or you're in my boat as a previously rabid fan, this beta is worth checking out. Do note, though, that it is a beta and has some missing functionality and known (and possibly unknown) issues. I'm pretty enamored, nonetheless.

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Source: http://www.mygnu.com/julius/proj_silverflow.html

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Software Beta Beat

Julius Eckert has made splashes at TUAW before, namely for his Bezel HUD and Showcase interfaces for Quicksilver. Now he's released a...

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Stephen Lang

I like this new interface! It's mainly eye-candy of course, but I don't find it intrusive at all. Plus it does offer some slight usage enhancements IMO- you have a slightly better view of other possible selections, and I'm used to seeing the Coverflow interface in Finder as well (though I don't use it all the time.)

May 08 2008 at 12:13 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jack

This just adds eye candy, and does so in a way that is distracting and makes QS harder to use. I'll be sticking to the good old Bezel. (And I'll nth the suggestion that QS doesn't crash on 10.5 if you stick to the plugins you really need - before I got rid of all the ones I'd installed on a whim over the years, it was crashing every couple of days, now, it never does.)

May 08 2008 at 10:57 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

naxalite

I've had some crashes, and now I'll look into how many plugins I'm running. This interface is really beautiful. Some functionality of the arrow keys is different, but it looks stunning and feels slick...

May 08 2008 at 8:04 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Halopend@gmail.com

Lipidity.com, the guy taking over quicksilver development has a beta on it that that I find more stable and efficient. Fairly soon we should have a greatly revised version with a much smaller memory footprint.

May 08 2008 at 7:20 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Elliot

Yeah, you guys having crash problems better start looking at your own systems for the solution. Between my girlfriend and I, we've got four macs of varying ages all running quicksilver and leopard, and we've had no qs crashes on any of them.

And yes, having a girlfriend that uses quicksilver is the greatest thing in the world, in case you were wondering.

May 08 2008 at 1:22 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

goboColossus

I'm on 10.5.2, 2nd Gen 15" MBP... Quicksilver has never crashed on me once. Been using BezelHUD since TUAW did their spotlight, and switched to Showcase a few weeks ago. Haven't had a single problem with either interface.

Coverflow seems to get in the way when I'm sifting through a lot of files. It's great for certain folders with specific files in the finder though. Doesn't seem too productive for Quicksilver, but that's just me :)

May 07 2008 at 10:04 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to goboColossus's comment

Stealth43

Same specs here, except its a first gen MBP, and I've had a total of zero QS crashes. Finder has locked up on multiple occasions, but not QS.

In fact, on my old g4 (that the gf uses) running 10.4 I was having some major issues with the OS (which led up to a DiskWarrior session that found 36% fragmentation...but I digress). When the dock/finder (two separate processes) would crap themselves, and the computer seemed totally locked up, on a number of occasions I was able to launch terminal through QS, and killall Finder or Dock.

My 2 cents ^_^

May 08 2008 at 9:02 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

WarnerO

Until they fix QuickSilver constantly crashing I'm sticking with LaunchBar.

May 07 2008 at 9:40 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to WarnerO's comment

nate

Stability problems with Quicksilver (on Leopard and otherwise) are usually due to either:

a) old and or buggy plug-ins
b) way too many installed plug-ins

To pinpoint bugs/crashes, start with only Recommended plug-ins, then add and test others one-by-one. Î²54 is rock-solid for me with 10 installed plug-ins. I wouldn't recommend running Quicksilver with more than 20...

May 07 2008 at 11:45 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

steven

I had crashes too, until I switched from the Showcase interface back to Bezel. I'm a little wary of this new interface, too. Sure, it looks pretty, but is it stable?

May 07 2008 at 9:12 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply