Month: February 2007

There’s a great little freebie productivity app for OSX named Quicksilver, and it’s become a staple of my daily use. Simply put, it’s a launcher for OS X. More detailed, it’s a “launch and do something with this” tool.

Here’s its simplest form: I hit CTRL-SPACE to invoke Quicksilver. I then type in the first three or four letters of a program I want to launch (W-O-R-L-D) and “World of Warcraft” appears in a little two-pane window, with “Open” as the default action. Pressing the Enter key then launches WoW. Great, saves space on the old dock.

But, it gets better. Lets say I have a handful of photos I want to upload to Flickr. I go into the Finder, select the photos, hit CTRL=Space again. and this time hit command-g. This puts the selected items into the first action pane in Quicksilver. I then hit the tab key, type in Flickr, and there pops up the action “Upload to Flickr with tags.” I then press TAB to get to the third pane and type in the tags I want. Press Enter and the files get uploaded.

But wait, theres more! As part of my routine I need to upload a zipped file of screenshots to PC Gamer. Now, I could invoke Quicksilver, type in the enough of the name for it to find the file, then press TAB and type in “upload to site” and then tab again and have it choose the PC Gamer bookmark from Transmit. That’s an awful lot of work for a simple thig, So instead I can assign that whole action to what’s called a Trigger. I can tell it to take the Current Selection (so it’s not always the same zip file), tell it to upload to PC Gamer and assign a trigger to it, in this case command-ctrl-‘. Now, when I select something in Finder and press those three keys, off it goes to PC Gamer’s site.

The program rocks.