Some people like the new Quicksilver Menubar icon, others don’t like it at all. They find it too similar to the Spotlight icon or just not as groovy as the old one, which is the astrological symbol for the planet Mercury .

Help is at hand. You can get the old icon in a zip file from the Blacktree site.

Then Command-Click (or right-click) on Quicksilver in your Applications folder and select “Show Package Contents” from the Contextual menu.

Navigate to the Contents > Resources folder and drop in the contents of the zip file.

If you are a die-hard retro Quicksilver type, I would save the icons somewhere as I imagine that each subsequent release will overwrite the contents of the Resources folder. quicksilver, productivity, hacks, icons, mercury, menubar

For the next twenty hours MacUpdate is offering a 21% discount on BuddyPOP, an excellent “quick look-up” utility for Address Book.

Once installed, pressing a user-definable hotkey pops up a dialog window to search and match your Address Book contacts.

It then displays that contact’s information:

Of course you can do the same thing with Quicksilver, but BuddyPOP has an extra trick up its sleeve. It offers a very quick way to get info out of your Address Book into a Mail.app message (or any other kind of document).

BuddyPOP also handles Skype, X-Lite SIP SoftPhone and Vonage, has support for sending and receiving SMS messages via a Bluetooth-enabled phone.

A steal at USD 9.99. Snap it up from MacUpdate.address book, contacts, productivity, dialler, skype, SMS, apple mail, mail.app, quicksilver

The Dashboard widget xCuts is a keyboard shortcuts reference that lets you easily browse the shortcuts for Mac OS X, Quicksilver and more.

A recent update adds a section for switchers, which gives them easy access to the Mac OS X equivalents for the Windows shortcuts they already know.

To save space, the widget can be collapsed to the small size of the graphic in the top right of this post. When you need it, click on it to expand to the full interface:

Searches can be focussed by category, scope and object. The magic is powered by a MySQL database, accessed over the web with Ajax.

xCuts is freeware and is available from the developer’s web site .

[Thanks, Adrian]keyboard shortcuts, mac osx, productivity, quicksilver, widget, dashboard, not apple mail, apple, switching

In the Quicksilver forums today I stumbled across the link that brings you the very latest, more bleeeding-edge version of Quicksilver.

Apparently, setting the “Application Update Type” to “pre-release” in Quicksilver’s Extra Settings doesn’t actually deliver the most recent version.

However, this link does: http://getqs.com/dev/

Quicksilver β50 Bulldog (3787) looks a lot like its precedessors. After thirty minutes of poking around, the only new things I have found are the swish new menubar icon (a Q with a fancy tail) and working previews for the app’s various interfaces in the preferences.

But a large part of the fun with Quicksilver is never knowing what new thing is just around the corner.

Obviously, the pre-pre-release version is not fully polished. So there’s no complaining if it doesn’t all work out as expected. quicksilver, beta, prerelease, icon, previews, productivity, apple

Terry posted a comment today in an earlier Hawk Wings post about the formal syntax for creating iCal events and to-dos with the Quicksilver iCal plugin. It was news to me; it might be to you too.

Although the iCal plugin does its best to parse the date, time and content from your text string, you can help it along.

The documentation for the Quicksilver iCal plugin sets out the correct syntax. For events, it expects your text to look like:

For to-dos:

NB: Those long dashes are actually two hyphens.

Adding exclamation marks increases the priority of the to-do.

UPDATE: As Cooper points out in the comments, you need to enable Quicksilver’s advanced features option to make this work:

You will also find in the documentation some feature requests for the plugin that would be terrific, like the ability to mark to-dos done or add attendees.quicksilver, ical, events, to-dos, syntax, format, plugins, productivity

Earl Moore at Meandering Passage posts a description and flow chart of how he gets things done using Mail.app, iCal, kGTD and DEVONthink Pro .

The schema highlights the role of Mail.app as the collection bucket for 75-85% of the things he needs to do.

From Mail.app the sorting starts:

This is where my electronic communications are initially collected. If I receive something and I can do immediately, I do it from within Mail and then export the completed email task into my DEVONthink Pro archive (@File).

If it’s a project or has a future due-date I send the item to Kinkless GTD (kGTD) where a task is created with all the email body as part of the task description. From that point I handle it in kGTD. If something is only a Reference Item or a Maybe Someday Item I send it to DEVONthink Pro to file.

Mail Act-on and Quicksilver are used to speed up the sorting / filing / sifting.

I always enjoy reading about the structures other people use to get things done. It keeps me open and flexible in my own system and helps me to grasp more clearly what’s right for me in GTD and what’s not.

Test your own system .

[Thanks, Scott]GTD, getting things done, productivity, mail.app, apple mail, ical, quicksilver, kGTD, very pretty flowcharts

When Tony Arnold uncovered the hidden preference pane for Quicksilver’s new Cube interface, he just assumed that everyone would know how to configure the various settings.

I was only able to produce interfaces that made my eyes smart. They looked terrible but kept me awake in the wee hours.

Fortunately for the graphically-challenged, Quicksilver users are sharing their tricked-out cubes and the settings for them in a thread on the Quicksilver forum

Productivity with style.quicksilver, hacks, tips, cube interface, productivity