Quicksilver vs. Launchbar

Launch­bar is one of those very rare pieces of soft­ware that one cannot do with­out. Until last week, I’ve told every­one I know who’s switch­ing or upgrad­ing to OS X that it should be the first thing they down­load and install, and that they won’t regret paying the license fee.

For those who haven’t been bitten by the Launch­bar bug, the util­ity allows you to launch appli­ca­tions, open files and dis­play con­tact infor­ma­tion from your Address Book, all with a couple of key­strokes. It even learns as you use it, quickly work­ing out what appli­ca­tion you want when you type a couple of let­ters, with an effi­ciency that is almost creepy.

Now, there’s com­pe­ti­tion in the form of Quick­sil­ver, a free appli­ca­tion that works in the same way as Launch­bar, but with greater flex­i­bil­ity, more fea­tures and a choice of dis­play options.

At first glance, this makes Quick­sil­ver seem unwieldy in com­par­i­son to the ele­gant sim­plic­ity of Launch­bar, which you can use out of the box, intu­itively. After a few days use, and a bit of tweak­ing, I think I’ll be pimp­ing the new kid on the block from now on.

Here, in no par­tic­u­lar order, are a few rea­sons why:

• iTunes inte­gra­tion

  This is just amaz­ing. Whack the com­mand key com­bi­na­tion you have set to invoke Quick­sil­ver, type browse or itunes and up pops a list­ing of all your iTunes playlists. You can then browse them by typing ini­tial let­ters, and hit return when you find a playlist you want to play, or move down a level to look for a par­tic­u­lar song. That sounds a little com­pli­cated writ­ten out, but in prac­tice, it means you can be play­ing a song within a split second. (The same applies to iPhoto Libraries too, if you use that to manage your photographs.)

• Window, Menu and Bezel views

  You can choose from three dis­play modes for Quick­sil­ver. The Window option is default, but makes the app feel more of a stand­alone thing, lack­ing the tightly inte­grated feel of the other options. For now, I’ve been switch­ing between Menu, which layers the Quick­sil­ver inter­face over your Menu Bar - a nice, neat option for those of us lack­ing screen space - and Bezel view. I’m lean­ing towards the latter, which is not unlike the cen­tered pop-​ups you see when chang­ing volume or bright­ness set­tings, or Liteswitch X’s inter­face for tab­bing through open appli­ca­tions. (Although the fact that many icons end up look­ing ugly and pixel­lated is putting me off a little)

• Clip­board Viewer, the Shelf, and Finder replace­ment

  Hit your Quick­sil­ver com­mand key com­bi­na­tion, then Command-L and you get a view of the last ten items you copied to the Clip­board. I don’t need to explain how handy this can be. The Shelf is a fea­ture I haven’t used much, because the slick­ness of the basic fea­tures almost render it unnec­es­sary, but with Quick­sil­ver run­ning, tap Option-Command-S and you get a little place to keep stuff: just drag what­ever you like there - files, fold­ers, apps, con­tacts - for easy retrieval. Lastly, I hate using the Track­pad on my laptop, and there’s no room on my messy desk for a mouse, so I like to do every­thing from the key­board. Quick­sil­ver makes brows­ing the Finder as quick as nav­i­gat­ing from the com­mand line, but with all the advan­tages of graph­i­cal cues. You can, say, type a for­ward slash to start brows­ing from the top level, and find what you’re after by typing ini­tial let­ters, or using the arrow keys, very quickly indeed.

• Launch­ing URLs

  I can’t quite put my finger on this, but I quickly dis­abled URL launch­ing in Launch­bar, find­ing that the thou­sands of book­marks avail­able clut­tered up results. With Quick­sil­ver, and its little window dis­play­ing lists of choices, find­ing what you’re after is an easier propo­si­tion, and it seems to learn more quickly than Launch­bar, fig­ur­ing out imme­di­ately that when I type s I want to launch Safari, and when I type sr, it’s this web­site I’m after. A subtle dif­fer­ence, maybe, but one of sev­eral deft touches that are per­suad­ing me to switch.

• It’s cute!

  When I invoke Quick­sil­ver, and type the first couple of let­ters of a friend’s name, up pops their pho­to­graph from Address Book. With a click or two of the right arrow key, I can launch their home­page, send them an email, or dis­play their ‘phone num­bers. It’s not more func­tional than Launch­bar, but it’s a nice little touch, and shows the atten­tion to detail the devel­op­ers have put into main­tain­ing the famil­iar look and feel of OS X.

So - and it almost pains me to say this - Quick­sil­ver is the new essen­tial OS X launch­ing util­ity, and Launch­bar is unlikely to keep its place among my Startup Items. I should say at this point that com­par­ing the two is, per­haps, unfair: Launch­bar is still the better simple launcher, but the extra fea­tures of Quick­sil­ver just about make up for the fact that the learn­ing curve is a couple of degrees steeper. And, where Launch­bar is as stable as can be, there are still a few bugs in the Quick­sil­ver beta, not least the annoy­ing window lay­er­ing quirks when using the Clip­board Viewer or Shelf.

The fact that it’s free and soon-​to-​be open source is not a clincher for me, as it might be for some. But, that said, having replaced Pho­to­shop with the Gimp and installed OpenOf­fice in place of Word some time ago, if I now ditch Launch­bar I’m fairly sure my com­puter will be com­pletely free of com­mer­cial soft­ware and share­ware, either stolen or paid for; exclu­sively run­ning bun­dled Apple appli­ca­tions, free­ware, dona­tion­ware and open source soft­ware instead.

Even for some­one who isn’t a raving open source evan­ge­list, this feels pretty good. The open source under­pin­nings of OS X aren’t just a boon in terms of making for a vastly improved oper­at­ing system. They allow those of us too fond of shiny, pretty things to move com­pletely to an open source plat­form - how­ever much we know it is, polit­i­cally, the right thing to do - a chance to claw back all the cash those cap­i­tal­ist pig-​dogs at Apple grub out of their users for hard­ware and soft­ware upgrades. Which is, I’m sure you’ll agree, A Good Thing.

Update: In a timely fash­ion, Quick­sil­ver now has pre­lim­i­nary doc­u­men­ta­tion, which reveals that it’s even more sophis­ti­cated than I thought, includ­ing fea­tures allow­ing you to move files around, manip­u­late them, even com­press them. Wow.

Posted at 3pm on 28/03/04 by Jack Mottram to the mac, politics category.
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Tags: efficiency, foss, osx, quicksilver, reviews