I downloaded and installed Quicksilver last night on my PowerBook. Oh. My. Word. I pointed Benjamin to it and he said that he now lacks a head because Quicksilver blew it off. :) I’ve heard people ranting but never paid much attention till I saw a write up on Lifehacker.

I’m addicted after about 5 minutes of use. The installer is about the coolest installer you’ve ever seen. After that is done the application is so helpful and intuitive that I kept thinking, “Well duh, this is nothing! Its too obvious and simple!” ¹ Mr. Jabez Wilson started up in his chair, with his forefinger upon the paper, but his eyes upon my companion.

“How, in the name of good-fortune, did you know all that, Mr. Holmes?” he asked. “How did you know, for example, that I did manual labour? It’s as true as gospel, for I began as a ship’s carpenter.”

“Your hands, my dear sir. Your right hand is quite a size larger than your left. You have worked with it, and the muscles are more developed.”

“Well, the snuff, then, and the Freemasonry?”

“I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you how I read that, especially as, rather against the strict rules of your order, you use an arc-and-compass breastpin.”

“Ah, of course, I forgot that. But the writing?”

“What else can be indicated by that right cuff so very shiny for five inches, and the left one with the smooth patch near the elbow where you rest it upon the desk?”

“Well, but China?”

“The fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist could only have been done in China. I have made a small study of tattoo marks and have even contributed to the literature of the subject. That trick of staining the fishes’ scales of a delicate pink is quite peculiar to China. When, in addition, I see a Chinese coin hanging from your watch-chain, the matter becomes even more simple.”

Mr. Jabez Wilson laughed heavily. “Well, I never!” said he. “I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that there was nothing in it, after all.”

“I begin to think, Watson,” said Holmes, “that I make a mistake in explaining. ‘Omne ignotum pro magnifico,’ you know, and my poor little reputation, such as it is, will suffer shipwreck if I am so candid. Can you not find the advertisement, Mr.Wilson?” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, The Red-Headed League. This is the sign of a well executed idea. In fact it is so cool and so helpful we can look for Apple to rip it off and include it in latter versions of the Mac OS, a la Konfabulator and Dashboard.

What is Quicksilver? Simply stated, it is an application launcher on Spotlight growth hormones. The default keyboard shortcut is ctrl-space. Quicksilver then pops up in the middle of the screen. Next, you start typing the thing you’re looking for. An application, a file, a website, whatever. In the first panel the thing you’re looking for shows up. Tab to the next panel and you select what you want to do with it. Open it, open it with a specific program, etc. That’s as far as I have gotten so far but there are a number of things that can happen at that point.

The search function is better than Spotlight’s. As of late Spotlight is getting sluggish on both the iMac and PowerBook. I had it reindex the hard drive ²You tell it to ignore your hard drive, wait a moment and then tell it to include the hard drive in the search and it rebuilds the index and that only marginally improved the response time. That may be because my machines are getting a little long in the tooth but still Quicksilver is much faster.

I use Windows XP at work all day and I have to say that the two Mac only apps that Windows desperately needs are Exposé and Quicksilver. I haven’t played with Vista yet and it looks like they’re getting some of the Exposé functionality in there but someone needs to port Quicksilver. It really helps the OS stay out of your way and Windows really needs that.