The story doesn’t end there. Quick Search Box started life as a fairly dumbed-down, albeit OS X-compatible, alternative to Quicksilver. It seemed that this new offering had the support of Google and would go far. In the meantime, Quicksilver’s code was open-sourced, and the community started slowly hacking away at it.

Now today, we have access to a community-supported version of Quicksilver that runs smoothly on OS X 10.6, as well as the Google-backed Quick Search Box which also works well enough. So which is the better choice for daily use?

I dumped Quicksilver a year or so ago in favor of Quick Search Box. The replacement was good enough for launching and finding files, and since that’s mostly what I used it for, things were good. However, as time passed, the functionality of Google’s product hasn’t closed the gap nearly as much as I’d like to see. Neither has the developer support really exploded in the form of plugins, as we’ve seen over the years for Quicksilver. Worst of all, Quick Search Box isn’t as responsive as I’d like.

So not too long ago, I went to Blacktree and downloaded the latest Quicksilver release. I found it to be much faster than the Google solution right away. Further use has shown it to be nowhere near as buggy as it once was (I have yet to experience a Quicksilver crash after a couple months’ use). But the best part is, all of the old functionality I knew and loved — both native (oh, how I missed complex triggers) as well as plugin support (let’s hear it for text and image manipulation) — is there and better than ever.

Whether you’re a current user of Google’s Quick Search Box, a past user of Quicksilver or new to both, I’d highly recommend taking a look at the latest build of Quicksilver. It’s been a happy homecoming for me, and I’m confident that the great functionality, speed, and extensibility that the app offers will make it of great use to you, too.

If you’ve found bliss with either program, please share your tale, and what it was that was the make or break feature for you.

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I’ve been playing around with Google Quick Search Box lately and am especially enjoying this services plugin from Martin Kuhl which lets you activate and pass input to OS X services right from within QSB.

One snag though has been that services created through the new Automator template included in Snow Leopard leave out some vital bits that limit integration. Luckily, a handy application from Waffle Software called ThisService makes creating proper services that integrate seamlessly with QSB a lot easier than you might think.

Being able to extend the functionality of QSB with OS X services really opens up a lot of possibilities. Grab text or files in QSB and pass them on to your services to do whatever you want with them, like creating a new To Do item in iCal. I’ve been focused recently on replicating functionality that I lost when I made the switch over from Quicksilver and I think that this improved service integration will get me about 90 percent of the way there.

The bad news is that this means I need to whip up a bunch of custom services for myself. The good news is that ThisService makes that task very easy. Just give it a script (AppleScript will do, but if you’re more comfortable with other scripting languages you can use those), define the type and name of your service and click Create Service. ThisService handles all the fiddly Cocoa bits and spits out a completed service into your ~/Library/Services directory where QSB will see it and serve it up as an available action when appropriate.

Actually writing your AppleScript will likely be the most complicated part, which is why ThisServices comes bundled with some handy starter scripts to put you on the right path. They also make a number of example scripts and services available for download from their site. The scripts don’t need to be complicated. For example, here is the one I use for adding To Do items in iCal:

on process(input)
tell application "iCal"
tell calendar "work"
make new todo at end with properties {summary:input}
end tell
end tell
end process

If you wanted to get fancy you could pass additional properties like the due date, priority, etc., but just getting a new item into the list is all I need.

Once you have your service setup accessing them through Quick Search Box is as easy as can be. Because showing seems to be more useful than describing, below is a quick little video clip of the To Do service in action. What kind of services would you like to have? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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I was playing around with Google Quick Search Box recently and was really surprised by all the functionality it provides. Once I got it fully set up with plugins and services, I realized it can give me just about everything I used to rely on Quicksilver for.

Quicksilver has really become the default interface for my Mac, so I’ve been wary about losing options by switching to something more stable and future proofed, but after seeing what QSB has to offer, I’m sold.

Plugins

While QSB seems to be focused on searching for things locally and online, its plugin options give it the opportunity to extend its reach far beyond searching. Already there are plugins available for running Shell and AppleScripts, browsing your Delicious bookmarks, and accessing services, with lots more on the way.

Demo Time

I thought it might be fun to show you some of these features in action so I threw together a quick little screencast.

While I’d like to see some better integration of custom services (I can’t seem to get my homemade services to show up as action items within QSB — perhaps I’m just doing it wrong), I remain really optimistic about where this is all going. With the future development of Quicksilver up in the air, and with a ton of functionality already available with QSB, I think now is the time to make the switch.

If you have your own favorite plugin or service or additional tips for getting serious with QSB, please share them in the comments.

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From what I’ve been reading on support forums, some users of Quicksilver saw no affect from upgrading their machines to Snow Leopard. I however, was not one of those people. And although I am warming more and more to Google Quick Search Box, I still supplement my usage of QSB with Quicksilver where the former is lacking in features. So I tinkered around until I was able to resuscitate and use Quicksilver again under Snow Leopard.

Been having similar problems? Let me walk you through the process.

First, make sure you’ve upgraded to the most current version of Quicksilver. B56a7 is the most up to date version, that is built for Snow Leopard. Download it here if you haven’t already done so. Once that’s done, go ahead and try running Quicksilver. If you’re lucky, that’s all that is needed. If you’re not, don’t fret, because we’ll figure it out in short order.

What I found to be the issue with getting my installation of Quicksilver working, was the huge collection of plug-ins that I’ve installed over the years. Plug-ins (in my opinion) are what have made Quicksilver what it is to so many of us today. They extend it into nearly every nook and cranny of your Mac, allowing you to control everything. The downside, is that some of those plug-ins are broken in OS 10.6′s new underlying architecture.

So let’s fix that.

• Navigate (using Finder) to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver
• Open the ‘PlugIns’ folder
• Select all of the plug-in files, and drag them someplace else (I suggest the Desktop, for easy access, as we’ll be using them again)

Now, let’s make sure Quicksilver opens before we go any further. If at this point the answer is no, I’d recommend posting the question to the Blacktree Quicksilver group on Google. (I’m happy to help too of course, but I’m not that bright, and if I can’t duplicate your setup, there’s a slim chance I’ll be useful on the subject.) If on the other hand, Quicksilver is starting up, let’s continue.

• Quit Quicksilver
• Drag the first plug-in (that you moved somewhere, like your Desktop) back into that ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/PlugIns folder
• Launch Quicksilver

Did Quicksilver remain open? Or did is crash after a few moments? If Quicksilver is still running, then that plug-in was not the culprit, and you may return to the ‘Quit Quicksilver’ step, and repeat with the next plug-in file. If Quicksilver bombed after launch, continue on below. (Does this feel like a choose your own adventure to anyone else?)

• In the ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/PlugIns folder, delete the plug-in that you just placed there

Unfortunately, that plug-in was no longer valid under the new Snow Leopard architecture. At this point, you should rinse and repeat (so to speak), moving the next plug-in file from your Desktop, into the Quicksilver PlugIns folder, and then seeing if Quicksilver crashes or not. Do this until you’ve deleted the bad plug-ins, and have the rest installed, with Quicksilver running happily again.

As a point of reference, the plug-ins that appear to cause me trouble were:
- Airport Module
- Services Menu
- Text Manipulations (not 100 percent certain about this one)
- Image Manipulations (not 100 percent certain about this one)
- Any interface modules seem to be causing issues as well

The downside is, you may lose some level of functionality (if you were even using that particular plug-in) from Quicksilver. The upside is that you’ll still be able to run Quicksilver, if somewhat pared-down in capability. In my case, I didn’t lose anything I’d been using regularly. In the event that you have actually lost something of use to you, you can either downgrade back to OS 10.5.8 (probably not realistic), or wait on Google QSB to get up to speed, as I have seen some great strides on that application in a short period of time.

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Sometimes really useful software comes in small packages. Just about six months ago, I stumbled upon the developer preview of Google Quick Search Box (QSB) for the Mac, and I’ve been using it ever since. Google should be proud, because generally speaking, I shy away from desktop search applications, including their own Google Desktop for Mac product. Today, they released the full, stable version of QSB for Mac.

Quick Search Box succeeds by being simple and unobtrusive, instead of trying to superimpose itself on top of my computing workspace. In case you haven’t yet taken a peek at the developer preview, it basically consists of a floating Google search bar that retrieves results not only from the web, but also from your files, applications, history, contacts, and more. And Google plans to expand QSB’s reach further still in upcoming versions. Might I suggest Mail.app integration, Google QSB team?

Launching QSB is a simple matter of pressing Control + Spacebar (or a shortcut of your choosing, changeable in the app’s preferences) at any time. Results are automatically returned as you type, and you can specify searchable items and locations if you’d rather simplify your results. Gmail and Google Apps are also searchable via QSB.

Applications can also be launched and documents opened directly from the app, capability which makes QSB resemble a certain launcher app for OS X that has acquired a pretty significant following. The app I’m talking about is of course Quicksilver, a tool many swear by for eliminating some of OS X’s unnecessary steps and just generally making life easier for Mac owners.

The similarity between the two apps is far from coincidental. One of QSB’s developers is none other than Nicholas Jitkoff, the man responsible for Quicksilver, which is now open-source since his move to the Google team. QSB is a natural extension of Jitkoff’s work with Quicksilver, according to comments he made to Ars Technica when the QSB developer preview was originally launched in January of this year:

There were limitations to the way Quicksilver works that would make certain types of functionality very difficult to do, particularly anything that involves text entry—like handling URLs or typing search queries. Quicksilver and Quick Search Box are both focused on search, but QSB is going to try to search everything — something QS wouldn’t be able to scale well to do.”

QSB certainly can scale, owing to its ability to support plug-ins, which should, in theory, give it the ability to eventually search anything that is indexable. One great plug-in that comes with the launch version of QSB is a Twitter support, so that you can actually send tweets right from the application. Hopefully, that’s only a taste of what’s to come.

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Many of us are hip to Twitter these days, and there are a myriad of options for keeping track of the resulting tweets. I personally bounce between the webpage itself and Tweetdeck (while on my Mac). But sometimes I want to trim down my open windows to the bare minimum. Here’s one way to keep up with your Twittering, without having any windows open.

Twitter w/o Windows

You’ll need Geek Tool to monitor incoming tweets. (Geek Tool is a free utility that runs as a Preference Pane and lets you embed shell output, URLs, and more in your desktop.) I set up a new Shell Command entry, with the following command (all on one line):

curl -s -u username:password http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss | grep title | sed -e 's// /' | sed 's// /' | sed 's/ //'

This command uses the shell command curl to pull the RSS update feed of those you follow. Be sure to substitute username:password with your own Twitter credentials. The sed commands mainly perform a find and replace to clean up the output, removing html title tags and leading spaces. If you’re looking for more information on the curl and sed commands, pop open your Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities), and type man curl or man sed for the manual of usages for each. Geek Tool offers other customizations like font and positioning on screen so play until you find your sweet spot.

Using either Quicksilver or Google’s Quick Search Box (Quicksilver’s new sibling), will allow you to post tweets easily without a client app front and center. With either, you can quickly invoke the input window, type your 140 characters, and send it off to Twitter — and like that, the interface vanishes until you need it again. Using Quicksilver requires that you download an Applescript which gives you a ‘Tweet’ action, and then modify a Keychain setting for your Twitter login credentials — the latter can be a bit messy for a novice. Quick Search Box is much easier in comparison, only asking you to add your Twitter account details in one of the preference windows. Once you’ve setup Quicksilver or Quick Search Box, invoke the interface, type your Tweet, and send it off. Easy peezy, lemon squeezy.

This setup may not be useful for everyone, but it is nice when you want minimal interference while you work. I’m quickly finding this interface to be my preferred mode of interaction with Twitter.The GeekTool/Quick Search Box (or Quicksilver) combo do nicely to sit in the background until you’re ready, and then fade back out as soon as you’re through with them.

Update

Two TAB readers were kind enough to provide some modified code that are a bit cleaner than what I posted and are tweaked a bit to their liking.

Scott: “Here is the updated code that I’m using, which only uses one sed invocation so avoiding another process spawn (the head and tail are obviously because I only want the most recent 14 entries and don’t want the top line):”

curl -s -u username:password http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss | grep "<title>" | sed -E 's/^[ ] //; s/<title>(. )</title>/1/' | head -n 15 | tail -n 14

Matt: curl -s -u username:password http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss | grep title | sed -e 's/<title>/ /' | sed -e 's/</title>/ /'

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Who wants to go to all the trouble of opening a browser window just to search for something? Not me, that’s for sure. Luckily I don’t have to anymore thanks to Google Quick Search Box. The open source app was released today as a developer preview, announced via the official Google Mac Blog. This version of the search box is described as less stable than the Google Mobile App, though it contains clues as to what’s to come from the app in the future.

Among those features not yet active, but to be explored in future iterations are contextual search, actions, and extensibility. In fact, you can see immediately that the search box takes many of its cues from its mobile cousin, and will probably develop along the same lines.

I headed over to the Google Code site for the project and got my hands on the disk image available there so that I could take the search box for a test drive. The app is a light 8.4 MB installed, so my worries that it would be a secret resource hog like Google Desktop seem to be unfounded.

The UI is attractively Simple and Mac-friendly. By default, the app searches your computer and the web, including folders and your address book. You can choose to include/exclude specific locations from within the app’s preferences. Typing a search term generates live results, and displays the icon for the top hit on the search bar itself. Selecting a “Search Google” option immediately brings opens Google in your default browser, and you can choose to add website suggestions to your search box results, an option which is disabled by default.

You might notice some similarities to the now seemingly dormant Quicksilver. The similarities are no coincidence, however, as Quicksilver’s developer, Nicholas Jitkoff, is one of the core developers of Quick Search Box.

All in all, I’m very impressed with Google Quick Search Box, and can’t wait to see what’s in store in future versions. Might I suggest voice activation, as in the Mobile App?

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Firefox users may have seen the blog announcement from Mozilla Labs last month introducing Ubiquity. Ubiquity is an “experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.” You can think of it as Quicksilver for the Internet. In its most basic form, it’s a command-line for your browser.

For example, say you are reading the latest TAB review of the Logitech Premium Notebook Headset and want to find out more information on it, including a rough idea of what the going rate for it is on eBay. Previously, one would have to open a new tab or window, go to eBay, enter search parameters and get to the results. With Ubiquity installed, you select the text (or type it afterwards) for the search, hit your shortcut-key (mine is ALT-Space) and enter “ebay-search” and all those mundane tasks are performed for you.

For services that are more AJAX-ified (or just more dynamic) results can be displayed inline:

(To see a list of all built-in commands, hit your shortcut key and enter command-list)

Ubiquity even interacts nicely with Growl for displaying notices or information that you may want to be delivered in a more “sticky”, but non-browser, fashion.

The real power of Ubiquity comes from the ability to develop your own commands, and users of Ubiquity should have seen the confirmation bar when they hit TAB after this article was posted as The Apple Blog now has it’s own search command.

Just hit your shortcut key after accepting the warning and you can then use search-tab anytime you fire up Firefox (again, either by selecting text first or typing after the command). You should heed the warning dialog since there are no Ubiquity “malware checkers” and even if the initial script looks innocuous (commands are basically special javascript functions), you are actually subscribing to a link that will update itself and you may not notice that you have given up control of your browser. I would recommend only using Ubiquity commands from sites you trust. You can seek out new commands via the Herd or from the wiki (or just by hitting sites and watching for the confirmation bar).

The amazing utility of Ubiquity will emerge as savvy developers contribute to the project and come up with very interesting ways to display data from natural language queries (similar to the “book a flight” concept search on the Ubiquity main page), but if you have suggestions for other useful Ubiquity-enabled sites that are not just on the drawing board, drop a note in the comments! (It would be very cool if there was a Cocoa-related one out there, somewhere).

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I doubt anyone who reads this blog does not know about TinyURL or other URL shorteners: snipurl, dwarfurl, and urlTea. I am sure there are others. I wanted to share with you how I shorten my URLs because I just recently learned about it. Perhaps I am a little slow on the uptake, but I am okay with that.

Here’s what I do: Let’s say I want to share a link on Twitter, or send it in an email. There are two ways I do this. One is using the very handy Quicksilver, and the other is using a new URL shrinker I just recently learned about.

For Quicksilver: First, I copy the URL of my website. Then I invoke Quicksilver (be sure to have the Web Searches module installed).

Type a “ti” to get the TinyURL search up, and then tab twice and paste my link into the search field.

When I hit enter, the following screen will appear, and with a quick highlight and copy, I can copy my new tinyurl URL. Pretty handy.

The even easier way is with a new website I just found: is.gd. When you get to this website, you need to drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar in either Firefox or Safari.

Now, whenever you visit a page whose URL you want to shorten, you simply click the bookmarklet, and it shrinks your URL to as small as it possibly can be, then it highlights the result automatically, and you can quickly cut and paste it.

I use TinyURL when I want to right click and “copy link location” or I already have the link copied, and is.gd for when I am just casually browsing the web.

Both of these web apps allow you to include a preview window hosted on their servers so that people can view them. For TinyURL you need to add a “preview.” to the beginning of any TinyURL generated URL, as you can see in the TinyURL image above. For is.gd, it is much simpler, you just add a hyphen (-) to the end of the address and it will give your viewer a preview. So, http://is.gd/46w- is what that would look like.

Both these options will give you a way to shorten your URLs, especially those pesky Amazon.com links.

Do you know of any faster or better ways to shorten URLs?

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