My Mac Essentials, Part One: System Utilities
Saturday, July 16th, 2005Inspired 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.
(more…)
