New Quicksilver builds | Hawk Wings

Since going open source late last year, things have seemed pretty quiet in the world of our favorite app launcher, Quicksilver. Today, our pal, Tim Gaden of Hawk Wings, posts on the availability of a bug fix release of Quicksilver that's come out in the last few weeks. He also points to a thread on the QS Google Group that suggests Quicksilver's auteur and flippered mystery bot, A1c0r, is currently hard at work on a substantial rewrite.

Please note that this is only a bug fix version, the creator of Quicksilver (Alcor) is working on a complete re-write of the frameworks of Quicksilver and should hopefully release it soon ;)

The post by user Patrick also refers to a separate, similarly numbered "Ankur's cleaned-up QS version," which refers to the work Ankur Kothari has been doing primarily to reduce the weight of Quicksilver's code.

These have been white knuckle months for me (and a lot of other Quicksilver nerds), dreading the inevitable OS X update that might break the aging Quicksilver build we've been using. This all seems like encouraging news -- although you have to hope at some point the different folks working on improvements will be able to consolidate their efforts into one big, happy, branch.

As far as the actual update, I installed it this morning without incident, and, notwithstanding the handful of known issues enumerated by Patrick's post, it seems to be running fine so far.

That said, this is a great chance to remind you of the fantastic rooSwitch application -- an indispensable OS X utility that lets you create multiple profiles which save separate versions of app settings and data in situ. Translation: if you accidentally break something important, it's really easy to roll back to a setup that will still work. rooSwitch is also super-useful for application testers and demonstrators who want to protect their "real" data while being able to test new functionality or do a demo with "fake" data. It's become my step 0 whenever I want to play with potentially unstable apps, and I do highly recommend using it with your inevitable Quicksilver experiments.

Screengrabs to give you the rooSwitch flavor: