Aint that special

I’ve used Leopard all weekend and I am hooked. I expected it to be just a mediocre upgrade without those gotcha features. I’ve been proven totally wrong. Since top ten lists are all the rage with the internets, here’s mine.

Top ten reasons to embrace Leopard

10) I actually like the Dock now (I don’t hide it in the basement between uses anymore)

9) Coverflow sucks less than I thought (It is actually handy for folders with images, but not much else)

Unified UI in all applications

7) Safari 3 no longer beta (it just feels more complete now)

6) Spotlight ROCKS! (if you are using Quicksilver just for launching, go with Spotlight now)

5) Stacks is handy (much nicer than folders in the dock)

4) Todo lists in mail—finally

3) Preview completely replaces Acrobat for most users

2) Time Machine actually works (if you need it)

1) It’s FAST AS HELL (seriously, my Mac Pro finally feels like a zippy machine)

I know some people will argue that my #1 might be due to a fresh untainted system, but I’ve reinstalled 10.4 several times on my Mac Pro, and it never felt this fast. OS 10.5 feels solid.

Here’s a simple use for Quicksilver. Create a new trigger with the first pane set to your music library. Set the second pane to “Search Contents” and now you can load any song while working in any application. Shouldn’t iTunes come with this feature built in?

Update:

Another way to do this is with the iTunes plugin for Quicksilver. Invoke QS and start typing “iTunes”, then right arrow in to see a list available options like browsing artists, tracks, genre etc. This is a pretty nice interface as well.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Quicksilver, Tip, Trick

Remember back when Steve Jobs introduced us all to Spotlight. He did a demo that seemed like magic. He typed in a word and Spotlight found audio, video, photo and text documents related to that word. I was amazed and rushed to get Tiger installed on my mac. What a let down when I realize that this only works if you have tagged your files with Spotlight comments. That can be tedious to do. Normally you have to select the file, get info on it, then type in the tags and close the info box. With some basic Quicksilver skills, you can automate this process. Here is the documentation for the Tagging plugin of QS.

The only modification to this tutorial is to select some files to tag and then invoke Quicksilver. You can do this by navigating in the finder and selecting the files you want tag. Invoke Quicksilver (ctrl-space) and hit that super secret key combo cmd-g to bring them all into Quicksilver. I’m pretty sure that this is the fastest and easiest way to add Spotlight comments.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Quicksilver

A previous post showed how to use Apple’s Automator to create a workflow for taking a screenshot and sending it to iPhoto. Wouldn’t it be great if you could associate a hotkey to run this work flow? Enter Quicksilver.

First you must setup QS to catalog your Scripts folder. Go to the catalog preferences for QS and select Custom on the left side panel.

Now you can create a new Folder scanner. QS does not scan your entire hard disk as a default. Personally this can be good and bad. Speed of searching is greatly increased with a smaller catalog, but you may miss finding things that are not in the documents or application folders.

After you’ve created a new File and Folder Scanner, examine the info for this new catalog. Set the path to include ~/Library/Scripts and set the depth to infinite. Now you can access any scripts or Automator workflows that are in your script menu. While running scripts from within Quicksilver can really be a boon to your productivity, the exciting opportunity is assign Triggers within QS. Triggers are just like Quickeys (I loved it in the old OS 7-9 days) but who needs another application running when Quicksilver is such a Swiss Army Knife.

Go to the Triggers preference in QS and select Custom Triggers. And a new trigger and name it something descriptive. You’ll get the standard QS interface. Select your script or workflow in the first pane and “Execute Workflow” in the second. Save the trigger.

Get info on this new trigger. Edit the Hot Key setting. I’ve chosen something easy to use and remember (and that doesn’t conflict with any other Hot Key). What’s even nicer is that QS allows you to choose which application have access to this new Hot key trigger. This is convenient if an application already uses that particular key combination or if you only want the shortcut available under certain circumstances.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Automator, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Quicksilver, Software