Quicksilver

I love quicksilver. There is no better productivity program out there than one which lets you open programs, files, folders, scripts, etc without the need to point and click.

What is Quicksilver you might ask? Well, it is similar to spotlight in that you can hit a combination of keys to bring up a window to type in. As you type it finds things for you. It has a load of options to customize how it searches, what it searches, and how you deal with it. I can say that I haven't even come close to using all of it's features. I mostly use it for opening applications, which is a severe underuse of the program. But, the more I use it, the more I do with it. For instance, it has triggers. I can assign keystrokes to perform certain actions in the system. One I use all the time is iTunes triggers. I can pause, rate, skip and other commands with the keyboard alone. No mouse is required to do these things, no switching of windows. If I don't want to hear a song I hit my set of keys and it's on to the next and I haven't left my current application. 

The program is adaptive, so it can learn from what you type and what you select. The next time type part of the name of a program or file, the one you repeatedly select will become the default. But, because of all that it can do, it also suffers from memory leakage. When used often and completely it must index everything, including it's own database of memorized keystrokes. If you don't restart the program or your computer frequently, it can easily eat up a lot of RAM. This does tend to be a problem for me as I rarely restart my laptop. I wouldn't mind having a scheduled script to close and reopen quicksilver for me, that might be something I could work on. Otherwise, the program is awesome and is the most useful program you can put on your computer. It's even better than trying to find a replacement for finder. It's absolutely free so download a copy today!

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Growl

I installed Growl for the second or third time since I've had my Mac. The first two times I never saw what was so special about it. This last time, I actually installed many of the plug-ins, particularly the Mail plug-in. I'm still kind of mixed on it, but I think I like it enough to keep it. First, Growl pops up when events in the system occur. For Mail, this means whenever I receive email I see a popup. It doesn't steal the focus of the mouse or keyboard, so it's fairly non-intrusive. There is one interesting feature called Sticky Notifications. While I'm active on the computer, a notification will show for a moment. The time frame that it stays up seems to vary with how long I stop doing what I'm doing to read the notification. If I barely stop at all, the notification seems to disappear quickly. But, when the computer is idle, all notifications stay. This is nice if I leave for dinner or something. When I get back, there's usually several notifications to tell me what's going on. This can be good, or this can be bad, depending on how you look at it. One thing I'd like is a clear all option. The problem with Sticky Notifications is that once they are stuck, you have to individually click on the x to close each one. But it is nice to see part of an email to know if it's important or not, as opposed to Mail's new mail indicator which only shows how many new mails, not from whom they are from. This means that you have to be curious enough to open Mail and look. I'm not so curious and have a tendency to just ignore them thinking it might be junk mail. With Sticky Notifications, I see what has arrived and if it is of particular interest then I can click on the notification itself and the email will open. I like that feature a lot. There are also no questions about whether a file has downloaded or not. I like to close the Safari or Firefox download window, but I never receive any notification when the download is complete except to find the download window again or try the file. But Growl saves me there as well by letting me know the instant the download is complete. There appears to be Growl extensions for all your favorite programs, including Adium, Safari, Firefox, SuperDuper!, and many many more. Maybe you wouldn't want to have a pop-up everytime something happens, but I kind of like being fully informed and think Growl is a wonderful program and well worth the price of FREE.

[EDIT] As of 3/19/08, Growl still doesn't want to run on Leopard. It runs, but nothing ever happens, despite the fact that the designers say that it works. GrowlMail, my favorite feature of Growl, doesn't run at all. Again, they indicate that upgrades have been made and it should run, but I've never been warned of any new mail. GrowlTunes has failed to show me a single pop-up when a song changes. I have no idea what's wrong, but I've uninstalled and reinstalled many times to no avail.

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