Life is grand

The Mac Joy^TM continues as I spend a few hours pimping my Mac.

Spotlight is very useful but it takes one more key-stroke to launch an app than you’d want. First I tried LaunchBar which worked pretty well and then I tried Quicksilver which took it to another level. At its most basic it works like Spotlight but cuts out the extra key-press. But it does so much more. The Google plugin lets you search Google through Quicksilver, super fast. The clipboard plugin lets you record and manipulate the clipboard, through Quicksilver. You can quicksilver your entire iTunes database, copy files, append text to files and, well, pretty much anything all through the keyboard. It is the type of app. you have to try to really grok and then you’ll see how fast and efficient it makes everything you do. Quicksilver is free (albeit in beta with a future option to charge) unlike Launchbar. Spotlight is still useful for finding documents as it tends to index new files faster than Quicksilver.

Hardware wise the double-finger scrolling of the trackpad works really well. All trackpads need to do this.

Pimping further you’ll want Menufela which simply hides the main OSX menu, freeing up some space, and assigns a shortcut for showing and hiding it. Simple and handy. Then get Cleardock which removes the dock’s background making for a cleaner dock.

I am impressed with the quality of 3rd party apps out there. There are probably many other apps. I’ll be giving a try. One I did try that hasn’t survived is Growl. Good idea but it didn’t work seamlessly. Perhaps it is something to be integrated into OSX itself?

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 9:16 pm and is filed under AAA, Mac, Mac Diary, OSX, cleardock, mac osx, menufela, pimp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.