While I was away, an interesting thing happened in the world of productivity apps for Mac. Nicholas Jitkoff, the developer of Quicksilver 
, was hired by Google to develop something similar for the company and its ever-expanding suite of apps. (Ars Technica carries the full story.)
The result is a sleek little app called “Google Quick Search Box”.
It has nothing like the power and range of Quicksilver, but it does provide a way to launch applications quickly and to perform a few other time-saving tricks:
As the name suggests, QSB is focussed on finding things. It doesn’t have the flexibility that Quicksilver enjoys, but it is good at searching. Of course, as one might expect, it excels at searching your Gmail archives and Google Apps documents.
But it can also find a bookmark in Safari or Camino and launch it, find a song in iTunes and play it, find a contact and display the information or start a new email to that person, and so on. It can find a document and offers the option to do one of six things with it:
A few weeks ago, extra plugins for the app began to appear, written by users, that expand its power and reach.
Aaron Ecay has written plugins for Firefox bookmarks, and two more that allow the interface to execute shell scripts and Applescript.
Martin Kühl has written plugins that access Leopard’s Services, search inside your Smart Folders and gain access to your Dock items. He makes these available on the github social coding web site where they are listed down the left-hand side.
(UPDATE: Nathan Parry has written a plugin for delicious.com that allows you to search and manipulate your bookmarks and tags.)
With these plugins QSB gains something like the power of Quicksilver.
For example, using Martin’s Services plugin, you can find a document, “tab” into it and type the first few letters of a Service to apply it to that object.
Here I am quickly emailing a text document to a student using the plugin:
Google’s Quick Search Box is freeware and Leopard-only. Like all software that is still in development, and especially one that works together with third-party plugins, you will come across an occasional glitch.
The latest builds are available from its project page on code.google.com. There is also a Google Group that keeps you up to date with conversations between users and the development team, and with even better plugins that are sure to appear in short order.
[...] Plugins add grunt to Google’s Quick Search Box [...]
Glad to see you’re back, I’m sure my productivity will increase no end now :)
Thanks for this info. I’d like to see more posts on Google Quick Search Box.
You might also be interested in the Delicious.com plugin available here:
http://nparry.com/qsb_delicious_plugin/
@Tom, thanks for the tip. I’d like to see more happen with QSB too. Let me know of any other plugins that you come across.
I’m happy to trade the flexibility of Quicksilver for the support and development QSB is getting, but I’ll be even happier when the poser of QSB increases some more!
Great to see you back Tim. How have you been going recently?
I just switched from Quicksilver to Google QSB actually, because I was under the impression it would search my Google Apps address book and calendar, but alas it doesn’t.
I haven’t been able to, but you may well have found a plugin that allows this? It seems silly that it can search my documents (although precipitate does that in Spotlight for me) but not my Google Apps/Gmail contacts.
Again, great to have Hawk Wings back :)
L.
@Liam, Great to hear from you! I recall one of the developers saying that contacts and calendars are some of the things still on the to-do list for QSB. Development seems to be cracking along at a fair pace, so it won’t be long. He said, hopefully ;-)
Thanks for the pointer to QSB. I’ve installed it and the plugins and it’s looking really useful.
Man, I can’t figure out how to Send File with Martin’s services plug in. I can send text and things, but not objects. Any ideas of what I might be missing? I’ve spent hours trying to figure this out!
Thanks for any advice, anybody!
latest QSB release seems to fix the problem, at long last. Moderator, fee free to eliminate both of my comments!
Thanks for all you do, hawkwings!
@Toby — You raise a good point. Not everyone may be able to work it out. I’ll post something on this, I think.
I thought that QSB would search my gmail account. How? Does it? I’m not seeing that this works???
Ken, as per my comment about to Liam, the QSB developers know that this is a big hole in the app, and are working to add it.