Applications

Quicksilver: Spotlight for Applications

By Zach Flauaus ⋅ June 2, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

OS X is one nifty little OS, as most of you may very well know. There are many tricks of the trade that make it easy to use, but some may not know about them. One of them may very well be the handy little application, Quicksilver.

Quicksilver is to applications as what Spotlight is to documents. All it is is a lightweight application that lets you launch any application by “searching” for it with a key combination. For example, I customized my installation so that when I type Command-Space, I get the Quicksilver window.

From here you can type whatever application you may want. While some of you may be wondering why you should use this instead of the dock, it’s mainly a thing of looks. I have over 100 applications in my Applications folder alone. Granted I don’t use all of them, but I use a fair amount of them. If I were to put them all in the dock… Well, I’m not sure they would fit in the dock. But now I can only have my primary applications in the dock and have everything else in the folder.

Another nifty feature to Quicksilver is the amount of customization. You can change the color of the bezels, translucency, whether the shadow appears, or even the complete look and feel of the window. For instance, I use the Showcase plugin which gives me something of a Front Row feel.

See? Isn’t that much more pleasing to the eye?

Quicksilver is available from Blacktree Software for free while customizations are spread all over the internet. Download it today. Trust me, you’ll love it.

Tags: quicksilver, Showcase