For years I was a devotee of Quicksilver, an application launcher and power utility for Mac OS X. And I was not alone: Quicksilver was such an excellent product that the developer got hired by Google to create a similar application for them. Despite Quicksilver’s source code being available, the project languished. Bugs created by the Snow Leopard operating system (or maybe just Leopard) led me, and many others, to finally give up on Quicksilver, begrudgingly, and turn to alternative products (I went back to what I was using before Quicksilver: Launchbar, with which I’m still quite pleased).
Well, I’m thrilled to say that Quicksilver is back! In fact, a new release, b59 went out on April 24th. Quicksilver now has a new Web site, at QSapp.com, and a corresponding blog at LoveQuicksilver.com. Quicksilver is still free, with tons of plug-ins, many of which have been recently updated.
If you’re using a Mac, and aren’t already familiar with Quicksilver, Launchbar, or Alfred, you owe it to yourself to check one or more of them out. It’s totally diminishing to label these applications as just a launchers, although that’s the easiest label to apply. You can launch applications with these programs, or open files, but you can also do thinks such as: perform arithmetic, send emails, move and copy files and folders, and much more.
