Quicksilver

Ubiquity: Firefox Gets its Quicksilver On

Merlin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:37:36 -0400

Take a few minutes this week to look at the Ubiquity plugin for Firefox. So far, I've spent just enough time with it to have my mind blown by the Quicksilver-like interface it wants to bring to web browsing.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

And, like our favorite OS X launcher, Ubiquity also has an ambitious mission: to move beyond onesie-twosie key shortcuts by using user-extensible commands to intuitively hook together bits of information like model train cars:

Ubiquity’s interface goal is to enable the user to instruct the browser (by typing, speaking, using language) what they want to do.

[...]

We aren’t there yet. Instead, we have the rudimentary systems of structured natural language commands. You can select something and Ubiq “translate this to French”, or “email it to Jono”. In both cases, Ubiquity is smart enough to realize what “this” and “it” refers to, as well as knowing who Jono is (by talking with my web-mail’s contact list). It’s also smart enough to be able to understand commands like “map Chicago Comics” and “yelp Tapas near SF” and give you rich previews and search results to get you where you want to be quickly. Even better, both of those commands let you insert results directly into, say, an email you’re writing so that you never have to interrupt your chain of thought.

Install it, try it for yourself, and, as you get started, do make liberal use of the Key Commands page (only available after install). There's also tutorials (that I have not looked at much yet) that show how to make and share new commands.

Every quarter or so I'm sorely tempted to experiment with The Big Move from Safari to Firefox. It's never stuck before, but Ubiquity makes it damned clear that the latest experiment starts right now. This looks amazing.

[Ubiquity link via: Waxy]

”Ubiquity: Firefox Gets its Quicksilver On” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 27, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Quicksilver's Back; Nerd Hope Cautiously Restored

Merlin — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:22:55 -0400

New Quicksilver builds | Hawk Wings

Since going open source late last year, things have seemed pretty quiet in the world of our favorite app launcher, Quicksilver. Today, our pal, Tim Gaden of Hawk Wings, posts on the availability of a bug fix release of Quicksilver that's come out in the last few weeks. He also points to a thread on the QS Google Group that suggests Quicksilver's auteur and flippered mystery bot, A1c0r, is currently hard at work on a substantial rewrite.

Please note that this is only a bug fix version, the creator of Quicksilver (Alcor) is working on a complete re-write of the frameworks of Quicksilver and should hopefully release it soon ;)

The post by user Patrick also refers to a separate, similarly numbered "Ankur's cleaned-up QS version," which refers to the work Ankur Kothari has been doing primarily to reduce the weight of Quicksilver's code.

These have been white knuckle months for me (and a lot of other Quicksilver nerds), dreading the inevitable OS X update that might break the aging Quicksilver build we've been using. This all seems like encouraging news -- although you have to hope at some point the different folks working on improvements will be able to consolidate their efforts into one big, happy, branch.

As far as the actual update, I installed it this morning without incident, and, notwithstanding the handful of known issues enumerated by Patrick's post, it seems to be running fine so far.

That said, this is a great chance to remind you of the fantastic rooSwitch application -- an indispensable OS X utility that lets you create multiple profiles which save separate versions of app settings and data in situ. Translation: if you accidentally break something important, it's really easy to roll back to a setup that will still work. rooSwitch is also super-useful for application testers and demonstrators who want to protect their "real" data while being able to test new functionality or do a demo with "fake" data. It's become my step 0 whenever I want to play with potentially unstable apps, and I do highly recommend using it with your inevitable Quicksilver experiments.

Screengrabs to give you the rooSwitch flavor:

”Quicksilver's Back; Nerd Hope Cautiously Restored” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 08, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Spotlight on Spotlight

wood.tang — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:54:47 -0400

The good man in brown just delivered my family pack of Leopard, and I'm itchin' to go a upgradin' all through the house. I'm particularly anxious to try the new To-Do features in Mail and iCal, the two apps besides a browser that I spend most of my time in each day.

One thing that especially intrigues me, though, is the reported performance improvement in Spotlight. Like many of 43 Folders' Mac users, I'd long given up on Spotlight in favor of Quicksilver. But on their latest Talk Show episode, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin raved about Spotlight's improvement, to the point that Dan (I think) said he hasn't reinstalled Quicksilver on Leopard yet.

Now I'm assuming this means he uses Quicksilver mainly as a launcher like I do. I've watched Merlin's demo videos and I've read about all the mind-bending things Quicksilver can do, but I've just never gotten past doing much else with it besides using keyboard triggers to launch applications and open documents. The setup and re-training of my brain feels like too much work to me.

Apparently there's a reason for this too. Again, Gruber points out a piece by Bruce Tognazzini, founder of the Apple Human Interface Group, in which he says that while users and developers commonly believe keyboarding is faster, testing consistently shows that mousing is faster. Remembering keyboard shortcuts is an advanced cognitive function that actually takes a few seconds to work out, whereas mousing counts on visual cues.

I'm going to leave Quicksilver in place when I upgrade this weekend, because I'm curious to see how it compares with the new Spotlight as a launcher. Sometimes I wonder how much easier it might be just to type "itu" to open iTunes rather than trying to remember whether I mapped "Ctrl-I" to that or iPhoto. And I'm going to keep the icons of my favorite apps in the Dock instead of launching them solely through triggers or Spotlight, based on the Tog article, to see if it feels any different than keying alone. I suspect that once I get used to it, I'll probably still go with a combination of both.

What's your experience with the new Spotlight so far? Could you live without Quicksilver now?

”Spotlight on Spotlight” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 02, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

How do you describe Quicksilver?

Merlin — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 12:43:36 -0400

Acting without doing SOUNDS good, but... (Ask MetaFilter)

I really liked this AskMe question about Quicksilver, since it's one that comes up a lot for folks who don't get as enthused about the app as I (and many of you) do:

Everywhere I go on the internet, Mac users rave about Quicksilver. I've downloaded it a couple times, and I sort of get that it COULD be really useful, but I am not sure how...

So what am I missing with Quicksilver? I see so many other people who get a lot of use out of it, and I am sure I can fit it in somewhere, too, but I just can't seem to figure it out....

Here's a portion of how I responded in comments:

Quicksilver provides access to almost any kind of stuff in your Mac's and your world -- contact information, bookmarks, files, Applications, system settings, and pretty much anything else -- and it lets you leap to any of these things by typing a few letters of the name (NB: Spotlight is more about contents and QS is more about names; they're complementary, not competing). So, that's the neato, Day 0 stuff.

But the big sexy comes with how QS understands the potential verbal relationships between any of those objects, then gives you a single keyboard interface for making amazing things happen...

I'll admit that it always makes me realize what a fanboy I am whenever I try to explain Quicksilver, but, truthfully, it is kind of challenging.

How do you describe Quicksilver to folks who don’t get all the fuss? How do you relate the sexiness?

”How do you describe Quicksilver?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 30, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Clever "Real Life Quicksilver" video

Merlin — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 21:27:36 -0400

Very fun video by Matt McInerney -- what it would be like if Quicksilver came to life outside your Mac. I sure like it better than living in a YouTube thread.

Quicksilver in Real Life from Matt McInerney on Vimeo.

[via: tumbl.us]

”Clever "Real Life Quicksilver" video” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Quicksilver demo by Nicholas Jitkoff

Merlin — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:48:53 -0400

Quicksilver: Universal Access and Action

A1c0r demos and discusses Quicksilver at the Google, including a good overview of why he chose to build the app in the way he did.

Alas, the jig is up for poor Nicholas. Now you all know that he does not, in fact, have flippers, and that he is actually astonishingly good-looking.

”Quicksilver demo by Nicholas Jitkoff” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 05, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Quicksilver proxies for fast, easy printing

Merlin — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 06:29:53 -0400

Faster Printing with Quicksilver

Mark Fisher shares terrific tips on how to use Quicksilver Proxies for faster printing:

Use this method when you want to print files that are on the Desktop or are all in the same folder.

Select the files that you wish to print by Command clicking them.
Invoke Quicksilver (by default, ?–SPACE)
Type the name of your printer until QS displays its name e.g. “Lexmark”
Hit the TAB key to select the next pane.
Type “open” and select “Open File”. >
- I recommend making “Open File” the default action for when you type “open”. You can do this by Ctrl clicking “Open File” and selecting ‘Set as Default for “OPEN”.’
>
Hit TAB to select the next pane.
Type “current” until QS displays ‘Current Selection’.
Hit ENTER.
Your files should start printing.

Also check out how to use the "comma trick" to print multiple files. Great stuff.

After the jump is the video for the episode of The Merlin Show where I talked about using proxies to access application menus.

Click To Play

Finally, don't miss Robert's tutorial on setting up proxies if this topic is new to you.

”Quicksilver proxies for fast, easy printing” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Michael Buffington: iGTD + Quicksilver + subversion

Merlin — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 07:00:53 -0400

by Michael Buffington

This is the second entry in a multipart series about my recent obsessive love affair with GTD, the iGTD application and Quicksilver.

In the last entry I put the emphasis on getting my tasks written down quickly and out of my focus into a system I could trust. I could choose to spend some time later to review my tasks and do what I like to call "iGTD gardening", where I check up on all my projects and do a bit of weeding of duplicate or irrelevant tasks, and fortify those tasks with whatever information comes to mind as I'm looking at them.

Since I'm now in the habit of pushing new tasks to iGTD and immediately forgetting about them I have the refreshing ability to work on a task without ever thinking about anything else. iGTD then becomes my set of instructions to follow when I need guidance, and if I've tended my task garden well, it's a rich set of instructions with a lot of tedious thinking already finished.

This system works out alarmingly well until you're possessed by SSD (severe stupidity disorder) and delete your iGTD database without even a whiff of lingering vapors. Immediately you'll be consumed by a profound and unshakable dread as you realize your tether has been severed from the mother ship and you begin to drift into outer space, your Tang to be divided up amongst your colleagues (even the ones you loathe).

Luckily for most of us, iGTD makes database backups upon starting up the iGTD app and for a couple of other events, and luckier still, most of us don't suffer from SSD very often.

But I often do, and don't leave anything to chance.

Rather than risk losing my entire brain to an episode of SSD I employ a SMP (scheme of massive paranoia). It might seem quite heavy handed, but I send a backup of my iGTD data to a subversion repository whenever the iGTD database changes. In a nutshell, it means I have a comprehensive history of every save ever done to my iGTD database, and am nearly assured that I'll be able to save myself from myself with only the smallest amount of data loss.

Now I'll be the first to admit that what we're about to look at is a bit Rube-Goldberg-esque, and I'll admit there's a certain joy in that as well.

A few things to know before we move on:

I'm doing this all on Tiger, which means I have both Ruby and sqlite3 installed out of the box.
Your paths to both Ruby and sqlite3 might differ from mine.
This code likely has bugs. I whipped it up in a few hours.

Also, worth noting - I'll be adding to this body of code as I move on with more blog posts about iGTD. What may look a bit like an empty shell now will get some more meat as we go along.

And finally (I promise), all the code I talk about in this series will be downloadable at some point.

Create some Ruby!

Create a file called iGTD.rb in /usr/local/lib/ruby (or /opt/local/lib/ruby if you're using the Macports version of Ruby like me).

Write the following code:

class IGtd

    def self.capture(string)

        i = IGtd.new

        i.push_to_igtd(string)

        puts string

    end

def push_to_igtd(string)    
    `/usr/local/bin/sendtoigtd "#{string}"`  
end


end

That'll start off our iGtd library with something basic. It seems totally superfluous when you think about it, but remember, we'll be adding to this at a later date.

The newest version of iGTD (v. 1.4.5) comes with a command line utility that allows you to pass your task along the same way you push tasks into iGTD through the Quicksilver plugin. The above code simply wraps some Ruby around that command, executing it when we call it, which we'll come back to in a moment.

Now we're going to take advantage of a Quicksilver feature that you might not see documented many places - you can pass text to Ruby scripts saved as action in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions. Up until recently I assumed you could only have AppleScript actions, but that's not the case.

Let's see some of that Action in action. Create a file called gtd.rb in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions that looks like this:



!/opt/local/bin/ruby

require 'iGTD'
IGtd.capture ARGV.join(" ")

This script takes whatever commands are passed in, joins them back up as a single string, and hands them to the IGtd.capture method we wrote above. Note that we join the string back up because Ruby splits up command line arguments into an array wherever it sees a space. So we simply reverse that process by adding the spaces back in.

Make sure you make the file executable. chmod ug+x gtd.rb should do the trick.

Once that's saved you should be able to invoke Quicksilver, press period to invoke text mode, hit tab, then type gtd. Your gtd Ruby script should show up in the list (if it doesn't you might need to restart Quicksilver [CTRL-CMD-Q]).

Now, despite the fact that you're using your own Ruby based action instead of using the iGTD Quicksilver plugin, your task will end up in iGTD.

Neat, but we're missing the paranoia. Let's add subversion commits into the mix.

At this point I have to assume that you've managed to get your iGTD.sql file located at ~/Library/Application Support/iGTD into a subversion repository, hopefully offsite. I'm gambling on the fact that you have some knowledge of subversion if you have any desire to do this at all.

Because the iGTD.sql file is binary, we want to dump it as raw text to be a bit more efficient with subversion. subversion only keeps track of differences between revisions with ASCII files, but keeps entire copies of binary files (which might not seem like much, but for a file that's in the 60-80k range, 6000 changes can turn into a 500MB subversion repository).

Having the iGTD.sql as an ASCII dump helps increase portability as well. You can rely on simple text editors to see your data with an ASCII dump, and in the worst scenarios, viewing raw SQL statements can be quite comforting if the alternative is viewing nothing at all.

Let's add the following method to our iGTD library (note that when you see a ↵ symbol that what should normally be on a single line is wrapping to fit the page - make sure you fix those lines if you're copying and pasting):

class IGtd
    def self.capture(string)
        i = IGtd.new
        i.push_to_igtd(string)
        i.commit_to_svn
        puts string
    end

def push_to_igtd(string)    
    `/usr/local/bin/sendtoigtd "#{string}"`
end

def commit_to_svn
# tidy up some of the paths
igtd_data_path = "/Users/mike/Library/Application Support/iGTD"
svn_path = "/opt/local/bin"
sqlite_path = "/usr/bin"

# dump the sqlite db to an ascii backup file
`#{sqlite_path}/sqlite3 "#{igtd_data_path}/iGTD.sql" &crarr;
    .dump &gt; "#{igtd_data_path}/iGTD.sql.automatic.bak"`

# commit it to svn
commit_msg = `#{svn_path}/svn ci "#{igtd_data_path}/  &crarr;
  iGTD.sql.automatic.bak" -m "Automatic backup of  &crarr;
  iGTD.sql backup file done: #{Time.now}";`

# if no changes were made, svn won't output anything - it'd &crarr;
be nice to know that we at least tried.

if commit_msg == ""
  commit_msg = "Nothing to commit, therefore no svn commit was done."      
end

# now send the message to growl
`echo "#{commit_msg}" | /usr/local/bin/growlnotify`    
return commit_msg


end
end

Now, whenever you push tasks from Quicksilver to iGTD through our gtd.rb action, subversion will commit the changes. I've added the luxury of being notified by Growl when the commit happens. Pay special attention to the paths in the script and make sure you're pointing to the proper places.

With this in place, not only are my backups effortless, but they're comprehensive. And because my subversion repository is on a remote server, I can reconstruct my task list as long as I have a computer and an internet connection. Given enough time to think about it, I'd probably get paranoid about my subversion server keeling over too. Entertaining those thoughts to their final conclusion would require I hire stone carvers and buy a large granite mountain to chisel my lists, so at this point I'm content with the offsite backup.

This extreme paranoia with an admittedly heavy handed solution helps increase my trust level with iGTD, but it also opens the door to doing other automatic tasks whenever I enter a task through my custom gtd.rb file.

In the next entry in this series I'll show you how you can enter a task in iGTD once and have it travel to both Stikkit and Basecamp with a few additions to the iGTD Ruby library discussed here, and even grab new tasks from Stikkit.

Following that entry will be something I consider quite special - getting tasks into iGTD from your mobile phone through SMS. Assume the bullfighter's stance and repeat after me: ¡muy emocionante!

About the Author

Michael Buffington - A serial entrepreneur and creative technological consultant, Buffington most recently served as the Community Advocate for Values of N, makers of Stikkit and iwantsandy.com. He's now secretly building games for the masses.

”Michael Buffington: iGTD + Quicksilver + subversion” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 28, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

MacBreak Weekly 45; iPhone release night; Quicksilver mouse triggers

Merlin — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 06:39:03 -0400

MacBreak Weekly 45: Talk Time

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Scott Bourne, and Alex Lindsay

iPhone gets a better battery and screen, MacGPS rumors, and Safari holes...

Here's a direct MP3 download of MBW 45.

Gotta tell you: I'm really excited about the imminent arrival of the iPhone for an unconventional reason: the possibility that we can eventualy stop talking about the iPhone. (sigh)

Anyway. Two things related to this episode:

If we can scare up a video jockey, I'll be at the Stockton St. store here in SF next Friday to shoot some stuff about that evening's iPhone release for MacBreak. Maybe interviewing people in line; who knows?
My tip of the week in this episode is a very cool Quicksilver trick called mouse dragged triggers. Explaining how it works is -- as you'll hear -- difficult, to say the least. So, herewith, I present my favorite tutorial on the topic, from the lovely and talented Dan Dickinson. He also has some great ideas for what to do with the trick:

If you have a shell command you need to run frequently, you can bind that and save yourself opening the terminal and typing the command.

If you're frequently asked the same question and want a polite way to imply that you're tired of it, bind Answer Text -> Large Type to a key and hit it the next time you're asked. Trust me, this works.

I always found it annoying that there's no hotkey to jump to your downloads folder (or any other folder you'd like), but this is easily resolved using triggers. Set them up just like Apple does - heck, you can even overrule the Apple ones.

To crib from my last tutorial: using the Search Contents action, you can create specialized Quicksilver instances just to search smaller pools. Try "iTunes -> Browse Tracks" for a subject, "Search Contents" for the action. Bind it to something similar to your existing invocation keystroke (I'm using Option-Space, since my primary is Command-Space), and voila, iTunes-specific Quicksilver queries. Way faster than switching to iTunes and messing with the search pane, and even a bit quicker than going through a basic QS query.

Read Dan's post: Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog: Another Quicksilver Tutorial: Gold Trigger

”MacBreak Weekly 45; iPhone release night; Quicksilver mouse triggers” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 20, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43f Feature: Michael Buffington's "How I use iGTD"

Merlin — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 11:55:59 -0400

Michael Buffington is a pal of mine who's a talented developer and all-around swell fellow. I got to work with him a bit on the Stikkit project and, in some of our offline talks on productivity stuff, I was intrigued to learn about some of his ninja geek skillz.

I asked Michael to write up a series on some of his favorite tricks to get his stuff done, and he kindly obliged. Here's part one.

--Merlin

How I use iGTD

by Michael Buffington

This is the first part in a multipart series about using iGTD with Quicksilver and how it's changed my life, allowed me to grow hair where I never thought it possible, and more importantly, spend more quality time with my children (who are, as you might know, super humans with indescribable special abilities).

I'm a recent and somewhat enthusiastic convert to GTD. I have had the good fortune of starting to manage my digital life with GTD the same day Merlin first mentioned a great application for OS X called iGTD.

I have to admit though that I'm not a very hard core GTD follower yet. The most important parts of GTD for me are getting my tasks out of my head the moment they pop into existence, and putting them into some sort of system I can trust. iGTD allows me to do exactly that in a very intuitive way, but if I'm having a good day I only ever bring iGTD into focus when I'm not sure what's next on my list.

“I've emphasized this before already, but for me the most important part of GTD is writing tasks that you can follow as if you're a robot...”

For task capturing, I use Quicksilver, and I have to say it's a slice of heaven. Without a doubt my life has improved quite measurably both because of GTD, and the iGTD plugin for Quicksilver.

So at the most basic level, here's how I use iGTD to reinforce what I think is the most important behavior for leading a GTD lifestyle:

I invoke Quicksilver. I hit the period (".") key to switch to text entry mode. Some people have different settings, so the the important part here is invoking text entry.

I begin typing out my task with some simple markup that iGTD understands. For this blog entry, I once wrote:

@blog write a blog entry about how I use iGTD to capture tasks [43f]

I then hit tab and type iGTD so I can send the text I entered to iGTD. I hit enter, and I know that my task has been captured. I even set iGTD so that it doesn't pop up once I've captured a task, I simply trust that it's there.

Here's a quick screencast of the process in action - it's worth noting that the screencast is all of a few seconds long, and the actual task capturing part is incredibly quick.

Click To Play

I've emphasized this before already, but for me the most important part of GTD is writing tasks that you can follow as if you're a robot (avoiding writing ambiguous sounding tasks in favor of writing very "actionable" tasks) and getting those tasks capture the moment you think of them.

So I'll be writing code, thinking about how to do something like simulate multiple inheritance in Ruby when unannounced the thought "I should call the local game place to see if my reality might someday be shared with a Nintendo Wii of my very own" takes center stage. If I weren't adhering to GTD practices, I'd ignore that thought and move on, but it'd nag me. It'd keep nagging me, and my focus would suffer.

With Quicksilver and iGTD I get the task out of head and into a place I trust, and because it took mere seconds to record I'm right back in flow, realizing that if I'm wanting to do multiple inheritance in Ruby I've probably designed something incorrectly in the first place.

I become more efficient at what I do, and have less "free radical" thoughts fighting for attention in my head, which makes me a far more patient, confident and relaxed person. That in turn makes play time with the kids sublime.

In the next entry in this series, I'll write about a particularly horrifying experience I had with iGTD, and what I did to solve the problem.

About the Author

”43f Feature: Michael Buffington's "How I use iGTD"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 19, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"