My Mac Essentials, Part One: System Utilities
Inspired by a series of posts on TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), here is a short series on my three favourite Apple applications. First up, three system utilities that expand the functionality of Tiger.
Quicksilver is the most used app on my computer. It functions as a quick launch utility like Butler and Launchbar, but a swag of plug-ins allows it to be expanded to much, much more. Quicksilver currently provides my iTunes notifications, a base for web and dictionary searches, a shortcut to my contacts and more.
For example, it could notify me every time an email arrives, either through its own notification system, or by communicating with Growl. I tried this for a week, but it drove me made, so I turned it off. It could do even more no doubt if I took the trouble to work out all its features.
Like many Quicksilver users, I wondered if the arrival of Spotlight would make Quicksilver less useful. But it hasn’t. I find that while Spotlight helps to find things quicker and to find things like text embedded in PDFs that Quicksilver can’t, Quicksilver allows to do much more with the things that it finds. This richer list of actions that can be applied to objects makes Quicksilver my first stop still.
D?ɬ©j?ɬ† Vu (or something like it - iSynk, Retrospect, etc) should be in everyone’s armoury. If you are like me, the advantages of a backup application that you can set, schedule and forget will save your life many times over when something goes wrong.
I like the clarity of the app’s GUI, its ability to make incremental backups and I like the fact that the developer offers a 10% discount for academic site licences.
Cocktail is the pick of the maintenance utilities. It seems to have all the features that I need from Cron jobs to disk management utilities, cache-flushing abilities, interface settings and the option of displaying hidden files, all in one handy app.
Related posts
September 13th, 2005 at 9:13 pm
[...] 2. Quicksilver, the application-launcher-but-so-much-more utility, offers a way to do this as well. If you have the Spotlight plug-in enabled for Quicksilver, call up the app, type a full-stop (.) to enter text-entry mode, then type the search phrase you want, hit tab to bring up the actions list, and select the “Search in Spotlight Window”. Hit return and Quicksilver will pass the whole phrase over to a Spotlight window which it will open for you. [...]
December 21st, 2005 at 10:17 am
[...] QuickSilver. Generally excellent and the most valuable third-party app I use. It sneaks in here because you can also email files directly from its interface and do lots of other neat things. Free. Astonishingly. [...]
October 9th, 2006 at 7:45 am
I’m disabled computer user trying to find my way around the Web at the least cost
to me. Would someone please advise me on how best to do this?