Launchbar Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

DimScreen simply dims your screen

by TJ Luoma (Sep 19th, 2011)

Once upon a time, I had an application which would dim the screen of my Mac down to 0, and then exit. Somewhere along the way I seem to have lost the app and can no longer find it. Yes, I know I could just hold F1 and do the same thing manually, but I liked having an app that just did it for ...

LaunchBar 5 gives powerful launching options, on sale

by TJ Luoma (Feb 26th, 2011)

LaunchBar is a smart launcher, which learns from your habits and patterns to help you work more efficiently. Until midnight tomorrow (Sunday, eastern time) MacUpdate Promo has LaunchBar on sale for $17.50, which is 50% off the usual price. I love LaunchBar because it's smart. For example, I ...

Apptivate 2.0 adds keystroke sequence shortcuts

by TJ Luoma (Jan 18th, 2011)

There are a plethora of "launcher" apps out there. I've used LaunchBar ($35) since it was released for NeXTStep; other folks seem fond of Alfred (free, with additional powerpack for £12, or about US$20), Butler ($20), Keyboard Maestro ($36) or Google Quick Search Box (free). The venerable but ...

Mac power tools: charge up your workflow

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Oct 8th, 2009)

I recently bought a new Mac, and I decided not to migrate years of cruft over to a pristine Snow Leopard install. I also decided to shed years of stale workflow and adopt a new way of doing things. Enter the power tools: software that augments the power and performance of OS X to do things faster ...

LaunchBar 5 beta available now

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Dec 7th, 2008)

File launchers -- programs that make it easy to launch applications or utilities from a few clicks on the keyboard -- are increasingly common Mac utilities. Although I don't personally use a separate launch utility (I use OS X's Spotlight), others here at TUAW have expressed their devotion to ...

GTD with Launchbar and scripts

by Mike Schramm (Oct 12th, 2007)

Saul Rosenbaum sent us the tip on this one, and he points out that we're a little "Quicksilver centric" around here at TUAW. He's right, we do love Quicksilver, but it's not the only launcher on the block. Launchbar is another good one (and actually, I've been playing with Sapiens a lot lately, so ...

LaunchBar 4.3 adds Instant Open / Send and more

by Mat Lu (Aug 1st, 2007)

I'm a devoted Quicksilver man myself, but the venerable LaunchBar seems to have started the whole keyboard launcher trend and retains many committed fans. Just updated to version 4.3, Objective Development has added a number of new features. In particular, Instant Open allows you to execute a ...

TUAW Podcast #26: File Launchers

by David Chartier (Jun 14th, 2007)

We talk up the file launcher and manipulator Quicksilver quite a bit here at TUAW, but there is a solid batch of similar productivity-enhancing utilities that offer different things for different users. Whether you're looking for a simple utility that lets you launch your applications faster than ...

Trampoline: the quickest route to the tools you need

by David Chartier (Feb 26th, 2007)

Application launchers are diversifying in big ways, and it's great to see the market expanding. After discovering LaunchBar then switching to Quicksilver, it was obvious how useful these apps are and how important it is that there be a wide variety of them. A new launcher I just found, called ...

Search your Stikkits from Quicksilver, browsers

by David Chartier (Jan 25th, 2007)

Remember that iNik guy we mentioned, who put together a handy package of Mac OS X tools that interact with Stikkit, the online PIM that thinks so you don't have to? He swung by our original post to mention that he's posting all sorts of Stikkit tips for working with this wholly unique PIM service ...

Stikkit web service has all sorts of Mac OS X integration

by David Chartier (Jan 21st, 2007)

Stikkit is a new web service in the same organizational vein as Backpack, but it employs some pretty wild tricks and technology to help get your productivity on. The idea behind Stikkit is to get rid of the manual page organization that locks you into one form of hierarchy or another by allowing you ...

Search Gmail from LaunchBar, Butler, others

by David Chartier (Mar 9th, 2006)

A MacOSXHints reader submitted a simple trick to allow app launcher utilities like LaunchBar, Butler and others to search Gmail. All you have to do is add a new search template to your launcher of choice with a specific URL and you're off to submitting Gmail search queries from [insert launcher name ...

Buy an ad here