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.
We've written about all of these applications before. What's interesting is the custom solution that Leo describes. He's created four simple text files -- today, ideas, errands and todo -- which he updates with Quicksilver's "append text" command. Finally, he uses GeekTool to display his files on the desktop.
That's pretty nice; simple and effective (I use Backpack myself). Part of the fun of being a geek is learning how other geeks do things.
I've been looking for something like this since Leopard was released. As you can see from the video above, Juius Eckert (whose Showcase Quicksilver interface we covered previously) has now released a Bezel HUD interface for Quicksilver that perfectly integrates with Leopard. It basically has the same functionality as the built-in Bezel interface but with the Quick Look style HUD characteristic of Leopard. If you've been wanting to give Quicksilver a Leopard facelift this is it.
A reader tipped us off to this very cool new interface for Quicksilver called Showcase from Julius Eckert. It's basically pure eye-candy, but what eye-candy it is! Taking its cue from Cover Flow it leverages Leopards Core Animation technologies to, er, showcase Leopard's graphical goodness. While I'm not entirely sure it's practical in the long run, Showcase is definitely a fun addition to Quicksilver in Leopard.
DTerm is a utility just released by Decimus Software Inc. It's a Leopard-only app that provides a hotkey-triggered HUD which allows shell commands to be run from anywhere in OS X. In case you're wondering why, just imagine what less window switching and screen clutter could mean for productivity on jobs that require both Finder and Terminal. Yes, you can do a lot with Quicksilver, but DTerm provides bash name completion with a dropdown, context sensitivity to your current path and full output with clipboard features. You can also type ⌘-↩ in the HUD to run the command in the Terminal, which will open up to your current path.
DTerm is all about reducing effort, really. The process of running a command in the current directory is reduced to just a few keystrokes and there's no need to grab the mouse or switch to another application. Better Path Finder integration would be nice, but the developers tell me that it's Path Finder's own use of the Accessibility system that prevents that right now.
DTerm requires Leopard and has a free demo (up to 50 commands) after which the program costs $20. Visit the DTerm page for the download and more info, including a speedy video that will satisfy your secret bash-voyeurism fetish and won't waste much of your time.
Here's an interesting list of applications supposedly killed by Leopard. There's no question that there's a huge amount of functionality in Leopard that was taken care of in Tiger by third-party apps (and this is just a list of freeware-- commenters pointed out last week that Jisho was made almost obsolete by the Japanese dictionary included with Leopard), but I'm not so sure this list is all it promises to be. No amount of tweaking to Spotlight will ever replace Quicksilver, and as good as iChat has gotten, I still like Adium for its easy customization.
And apps like CenterStage, who used to have a one goal (an open source Front Row replacement), have now been able to spread out and become more their own program instead of worrying about Apple's missing functionality.
As always, the best app for the job depends on both the job and the person doing it, so there are probably more than a few places where Leopard stepped up to fill functionality that users used to trust third-party software for. But it's a stretch at least to say Leopard killed these apps-- replication of one function now built into the OS doesn't mean all the apps other functions are useless.
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.
This one is a little bit of inside (blogging) baseball, but I know a lot of our readers blog themselves and so might find this tip handy. Ankur Kothari (whose Quicksilver customizations we've mentionedbefore) has cooked up an excellent little Quicksilver plugin called IconGrabber that does exactly what it sounds like. It allows you to easily create an image of an application icon at an arbitrary resolution in one of several popular image formats. Using a few simple terminal commands to change the defaults you can select the default image size and format. So, for instance, here at TUAW we post lots of icons at 125px wide in the jpeg format. With IconGrabber I can now create those images in one step as you see above, where I'm saving the Time Machine icon to my TUAW pictures folder. If you're not a Quicksilver fiend, Ankur also has a stand-alone application to do the same thing. In any case, if you regularly need to extract icons as images, IconGrabber is a godsend.
Long time readers know that we at TUAW love Quicksilver, the brilliant keyboard launcher application from Blacktree. Now after previously making promises to that effect, the developer (who likes to go by Alcor) has released the source for Quicksilver as a Google Code project. While Quicksilver has always had a highly extensible plugin system, this is great news for the code monkeys out there who can now really dig into the application. Mere moral users like myself can hope, however, that more eyes and brains working on the application will lead to more stability and faster development. A big TUAW 'attaboy to Alcor for taking this step!
Many folks have noticed over the last few days that TUAW favorite Quicksilver had disappeared from the net. Fortunately, Blacktree's servers are now back up and beta 53 (build 3814) of Quicksilver is available for download (download link). The new version is primarily a bugfix release, but is recommended for everyone running Leopard. Alcor, the developer, says that there was a nasty bug in the plugin downloading code of b51 which brought the server down. So anybody who had been freaking out over Quicksilver's mysterious disappearance should set their minds at ease.
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 look for a post on that one soon, too).
If replacing Finder with Quicksilver isn't your thing, maybe running GTD apps with Launchbar is more up your alley. Saul has a short writeup on how to get Launchbar running a trigger (he uses "TD") that you can throw short notes into to work with the GTD system. It's a simple process-- since Launchbar already supports shell scripts, you can create a script, hook Lauchbar up to it, and pretty soon you're taking down tasks and notes at a moment's notice.
Our love of Quicksilver, the sometimes inscrutable application launcher (and much more) runs deep, but Daniel over at waferbaby has us beat. It would seem Daniel isn't a big fan of the Finder and he is crazy for Quicksilver. Clearly, it took the next obvious step and replaced the Finder with Quicksilver. Read his post for the details, but be warned it isn't for the faint of heart.
When I posted about Mac apps in real life a while back, the number one request I heard in the comments was for Quicksilver. And it wasn't very surprising-- who wouldn't love to implement Quicksilver's genius and simplicity in some way for the real world?
And now, Matt McInerney's done it-- he's created this video (from what looks like a bunch of iSight stills-- weird effect and even weirder music) in which, with just a snap, he can Quicksilver up anything on his mind. There's still a few bugs, though-- Garageband pulls up a guitar pick instead of an actual guitar (or a whole garage band), and I don't know what version of Cashbox he's using, but mine never actually gives me money.
We here at TUAW are big fans of Quicksilver, the inscrutable OS X utility that you really have to use to understand (and even then some folks still don't get it). The developer of Quicksilver, Nicholas Jitkoff, recently gave a Tech Talk at his employer (some search company or another) in which he explains Quicksilver and the thought process behind its development.
It's time again for Ask TUAW, our weekly feature where you ask the questions and we make up the answers... er, I mean carefully research and determine the optimal solution. This week we'll be tackling questions about printing from OS X to a printer connected to a Windows box, AutoFill in Safari, problems with a FireWire hard drive, using a MacBook Pro power adapter with a MacBook, and more.
As always readers' suggested answers are most welcome! Please leave your questions for next week in the comments.
Leo Babauta at Zen Habits 
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