Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
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Spotlight on Spotlight
Matt Wood | Nov 2 2007
The good man in brown just delivered my family pack of Leopard, and I'm itchin' to go a upgradin' all through the house. I'm particularly anxious to try the new To-Do features in Mail and iCal, the two apps besides a browser that I spend most of my time in each day. One thing that especially intrigues me, though, is the reported performance improvement in Spotlight. Like many of 43 Folders' Mac users, I'd long given up on Spotlight in favor of Quicksilver. But on their latest Talk Show episode, John Gruber and Dan Benjamin raved about Spotlight's improvement, to the point that Dan (I think) said he hasn't reinstalled Quicksilver on Leopard yet. Now I'm assuming this means he uses Quicksilver mainly as a launcher like I do. I've watched Merlin's demo videos and I've read about all the mind-bending things Quicksilver can do, but I've just never gotten past doing much else with it besides using keyboard triggers to launch applications and open documents. The setup and re-training of my brain feels like too much work to me. Apparently there's a reason for this too. Again, Gruber points out a piece by Bruce Tognazzini, founder of the Apple Human Interface Group, in which he says that while users and developers commonly believe keyboarding is faster, testing consistently shows that mousing is faster. Remembering keyboard shortcuts is an advanced cognitive function that actually takes a few seconds to work out, whereas mousing counts on visual cues. I'm going to leave Quicksilver in place when I upgrade this weekend, because I'm curious to see how it compares with the new Spotlight as a launcher. Sometimes I wonder how much easier it might be just to type
What's your experience with the new Spotlight so far? Could you live without Quicksilver now?
5 Comments
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isn't using Quicksilver only as a launcher missing the point?Submitted by christefano on November 5, 2007 - 2:42pm.
Quicksilver is a great launcher but the reason I started using it was to get multiple clipboards. It works very well but takes some configuration. Now I just clone my old Isn't using Quicksilver only as a launcher missing the point? I think so. Some ways I find Quicksilver helpful (in ways that Spotlight isn't) are:
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