I think the time has come for me to say goodbye to Quicksilver.
Last week, I decided to wipe out my hard drive and start from scratch. My MacBook Pro seemed to hang up here and there. I wondered if one of my culprits was Quicksilver. 
I know other have had problems with it in Leopard, and tied me up with a spinning beach ball more often than I cared to admit.
I loved Quicksilver, but in retrospect, I might have been in denial about the problems the two of use were having.
So, as I was reinstalling everything, I decided to give LaunchBar a go. (I thought MacSparky was nuts when he did the same thing a few months ago.) I committed myself to a one week fling. The week is up, and I think we are going to stay together.
For the most part, it does everything I used Quicksilver for. I haven’t found a replacement in LaunchBar for Quicksilver’s triggers, but I only used one or two anyway. I found a script to add a task to OmniFocus in no time, and got brave enough to hack together my own script to dump a new note into Yojimbo.
Perhaps our budding relationship will be tested in a few weeks when LaunchBar moves from beta to paid status. But until then, we are happy for the time we have together.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow. I’m impressed that you like it over Quicksilver. I’ll have to give LaunchBar a try.
Rob,
Thanks for the comment! I think I would still prefer Quicksilver…it’s a prettier interface. But LaunchBar is proving more reliable and not hanging on me, so that makes it the winner.
Ghastly. I can’t believe what I am reading.
Thanks for the great site! I switched over to Launchbar a few weeks ago. It costs a little money, but I really like the idea that it has a professional development team behind it. It is also super easy to create new entries in Things, so you may have another crack at that program as well ; )
Duane,
Thanks for your comments. I doubt this will push over the edge into Things, but I didn’t think I would be leaving Quicksilver either!
I switched to Google Quick Search Box. It integrates with Google docs nicely.
hmm, I had trouble with quicksilver once. I had to reinstall it and then redefine all of my custom triggers (near 30).
Since they account for 95% of my QS use, it would be a hard app to give up.
I’ll have a look at LaunchBar anyway. After watching the quicksilver forums, I could be hit with a deal-breaking glitch any day now.
I just ran across a program called fastscripts lite which I am using to replace the “triggers” functionality I lost i switching over to launchbar. You might find it useful as well. http://xrl.us/beqgd8 <–made with the tinyurl trigger that came with the app =)
Woops…This is the link: http://xrl.us/beqgqy Gotta watch which window is in focus =)
I used and loved Quicksilver for ages, even though I couldn’t figure out how to customize many of the commands and triggers. For some reason when I installed it on a new MacBook Pro, it felt slower and gummier. That was around the time its developer, Nicholas Jitkoff, announced that he was moving on to other projects. LaunchBar was an excellent — and much simpler — replacement, but I just cannot pay to upgrade software I bought less than a year ago.
As of this weekend, I moved to Google Quick Search Box. Jitkoff is one of the developers, and its Quicksilver heritage is instantly recognizable. It was really buggy and primitive when I tried it back in January, but it’s evolving beautifully — elegant and solid. Have you tried it?
Thx for the comment Susan…I haven’t looked at it…just heard a little chatter about it here and there.
I haven’t yet had to pay for LaunchBar, but maybe I’ll take a look at Google before that becomes necessary.