Comments
Comment by marc nothrop:
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Wow, gotta love the web… tonight I rediscovered QuickSilver, via bsag’s post that she’s writing the manual… then the new LaunchBar 4 beta… and then happened across an old comment of mine, on your site as a result of an completely unrelated Google search (“oh yeah, what was that about, again…”)… and THEN what do I see, almost a mirror image of my own thoughts on this very subject!… so I guess I have to agree with what you’re saying! ; )
FWIW Your thoughts on the state of UIs, and the role of these types of CLI/GUI hybrids is just what I’ve been thinking; there is, I believe, a place for both, GUIs are very well suited to general purpose interactions, and tend toward supporting feature discoverability (but haven’t proven to be the Holy Grail in this dept., when your observe newbies!), but they do buckle a bit under increased complexity, and become less efficient.
Quite obviously the power in these ‘new’ hybrid CLIs is in the level of ‘intelligence’ they introduce, moving toward the ‘assistive’ interface; I think many of us have considered how a user’s functional intentions might be more directly addressed… you linked to THE, Robb Beal had his ‘Simpleton’ proposal (BTW I see what he’s trying to do with Spring, but it doesn’t really work for me), and I’m reminded of Microsoft’s demos of their earlier UI work that they bundled in (conceptually) with .Net, I think they were coming from the web service angle, but they were relying on natural language processing, which seems a bit fraught, at least for the moment.
Anyway, I’m not meaning to write an essay here!…
I have to admit I skimmed over QS when it was in early beta; I recall seeing it, but not really getting it, from the description: “Quicksilver is an evolving structure for manipulating any form of data.”, I thought it was some sort of file editor… maybe XML or something…!
As for LaunchBar, it struck me as fairly interesting, but for the price, I didn’t jump. It’s only been the later versions, with their increased support for application data (Address Book, bookmarks, history etc.) that it’s been of more interest (although I think I overlooked this a bit, in earlier versions.)
Anyway, it’s late (!), so a few quick comments;
One thing that sounds really interest is QS’ support for System Services… that seems a very suitable way to support extensible application integration, basically for free.
It also supports AppleScript for functionality; again, good choice, I think.
In my search for these sorts of functionality, I’ve been using a bunch of individual apps to get a number of these features, but I’m running out of keyboard shortcuts!
I’ve used a number of apps for web searches, and have become ‘search string’ mad ; )
While OmniWeb have had them for ages, OW5 has certainly made dealing with, and adding searches a lot easier. In Safari I use Saft to get search shortcuts (maybe you do too; PithHelmet doesn’t have that feature?!) As a nice extra, Saft adds the shortcuts to the contextual menu, so you can control click on a phrase, and search via a range of search engines (e.g. select a reference to a particular app, and find it at MacUpdate.)
Outside of the browser, my favourite is Chercher, a really nice way to bring up a floating search box, with whatever search strings you’ve entered.
BuddyPop allows you to quckly search the address book, again, via an on-call floating window.
There are a few others that I use, but they don’t really offer similar functionality to QS and LB.
On the one hand, there’s something to be said for a tool for a specific task, and there are aspects of these little apps, that I prefer over their more sophisticated competition, but there’s the rub… QS and LB are more sophisticated, show a lot of promise, and offer some levels of customisation, and extensibility.
Anyway, that’s enough for now! You said it all fare better, and more succinctly than I! : )
Comment by ssp:
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Marc, thanks for your detailed comment. I’ll add a few ‘counter’ comments:
- I have also tried ‘Spring’, thought it was pretty and all but found that I don’t have much use for it either. Interesting ideas, but perhaps too early?
- I tried QuickSilver’s system services feature and perhaps I got it wrong. It didn’t seem to do a lot for me. Mainly it seemed to clutter the menu with the gazillions of services that manage to sneak their way into the Services menu but I couldn’t invoke them in the places where I most wanted to, i.e. on selected text, which is still my primary use for system Services. Are your experiences any better?
- PithHelmet does actually offer search strings. They are not really a part of the obviously advertised features though. Basically getting to use them is part of the magic ‘Transmogrifier’ and setting them up requires some manual PList editing. The ‘Transmogrifiers’ basically let you operate on the URL entered in Safari’s URL field with regular expressions. That probably makes them much more powerful than the average search string feature as you can have multiple parameters &c. (One thing I used it for was to redirect all requests to earthlingsoft.net to a different server name while our domain was down, say). I prefer this solution to the other ones mainly because I have PithHelmet installed anyway and don’t need to put up with even more add-ons this way.
- I know BuddyPop as well and thought it’s quite nice. In fact it was a comment to my post on BuddyPop that pointed the address book support of LaunchBar out to me and made me reconsider that solution again.
Comment by Gummi:
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I wrote up a some stuff about Launchbar a few days ago but I didn’t have the courage to add my penny, I will comment, though.
I’ve been using Launchbar for a quite a while, mainly to forego alot of mousing around and to eleviate mild RSI. I think it’s one of the few applications that transcends the geek-normal person barrier.
On Friday I convinced a friend to check it out. This guy is a Mac archetype, his desktop and hard drive is completely disorganised, his applications are everywhere and he still uses Explorer. “Tabs! Who cares about tabs. Standards, what’s that?” I’ll never convince him to try Safari, nor will he switch to Mail from Eudora, he doesn’t even use a spam filter -“I don’t care, I just delete the stuff.”
Anyway, Launchbar is the one thing we can both look at in awe and wonder. The really cool thing was the way he picked up the nuance and control within a couple of minutes. He may not use wildcard filtering, but at least he can filter in his own simpler way. There’s very few examples which work like this, although a recent one is Unison. Those MP3 previews always give a good reaction.
On the services and application integration. I love that idea, especially the Bibdesk stuff, removing step B from A > B > C is always cool, and since reference managing is an everyday task I’d love it. I just have to switch over to Bibdesk, currently on Endnote and hating it.
Comment by ssp:
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g: I really thought I was ahead of the curve with this post. But it sat on my hard drive for a few days before being posted because I was quite busy. Now man and dog have written about launchers, so it’s (or doesn’t look) quite as original anymore. A bit redundant even.
I don’t know Endnote. Bibdesk works quite well for me (mainly using BibTeX references which are copied straight fromt the web and linking local / internet PDF files to them if possible. I can send you a modified copy of Bibdesk with the changes I described – but I haven’t heard back from Michael yet on whether I seriously broke things I didn’t see…
Oh, and I tend to consider myself a Mac archetype…
Comment by marc nothrop:
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Sven,
Re PithHelmet, I’d (pretty obviously) not thought of using the transmorgifier in that way; I’ve clearly not really gotten it’s significance. I use the simpler Saft for search shortcuts… more suitable to the user, in this case. ; )
When I was talking about the System Services feature of Quicksilver, I hadn’t tried it, now that I have, I see where you’re coming from.
Now, as you say, if I could call up Quicksilver, and have it operate on the currently selected text (most services operate on text, not files), that would be interesting, especially as you’d expect it to filter out irrelevant, file-oriented actions. Coupled with the (unfortunately kinda ugly) AtYourService, and/or AppleScript, you’d have a very powerful set of tools, literally at your fingertips.
BTW AtYourService, and ICeCoffEE give a nice, kind of approximation of this, in that you can have your Services menu added to your contextual menus, and AtYourService allows you to add AppleScripts, web service URLs etc. to the services menu.
Overall, like you, I’m not wholly convinced about Quicksilver just yet, although I think it’s prettier to look at that LaunchBar, I think I tend to prefer LB’s ‘single selection mode’, rather that QS’ type-tab-type-select model… I can definitely see how that’s useful when dealing with files, moving/copying etc., and it’s nice how it comes up with the file if you’ve already selected it, but I’m just not sure I feel as comfortable with this method when calling up an app, for instance, but we’ll see I guess.
On the one hand I can see the value in being able to string together commands (e.g. to open a particular file, with a particular app), but I can often do that quicker just via the Finder…
As for the post being redundant, I know what you mean, but no way yours was the post that got me in first!
Not sure if you’re interested, but re other tools I mentioned, I’d have say that the freeware X-Tunes is a nice way control iTunes; yes it’s a one trick pony, but because of that it presents a more task appropriate UI
BTW - I like your ‘universal command-line’ moniker, pithier than hybrid CLI/GUI… ; )
Comment by ssp:
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Marc,
AddYourService looks like a good idea. It also looks rather expensive for an almost-trivial tool. Should I consider this very useful at some stage, I’ll consider writing my own as programming a Service is rather easy (and running a Unix command as a service iirc can be done without any programming needed).
On the other hand, the Services menu is quite crowded already - that and UI consistency were the main reasons for removing the inactive items from the menu in IceCoffee, Adding more items to it may be a bit too much. Sadly I couldn’t figure out how to remove the items I don’t want from allServices menu in the system.
I agree that XTunes is nice. I use it very rarely but it can come very handy when quickly wanting to know the name of the current song. It was also the first app I knew to use transparent-bezel-fading eye candy (which we subsequently included in UnicodeChecker as well :)
