Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Konfabulator, LaunchBar and Tiger

During his WWDC keynote last week Steve Jobs gave a preview of the next release of MacOS X, Tiger. There's a vague stink in the shareware developer's community at the resemblance between one function, Dashboard, and long-standing shareware desk accessory thingy Konfabulator.

There's a pretty good and comprehensive refutation of the claims that Dashboard is just a ripoff of Konfabulator at Daring Fireball. The real point of this post is to highlight a tool which was recommended to me as providing similiar functionality to another Tiger feature, Spotlight.

Spotlight is a system for indexing the contents of your machine and making them easily searchable. But wait! An application that's available today for adding a fast search function to your machine is LaunchBar. Version 4 is currently in beta testing, but the continued availability of a NextSTEP version kind of hints that LaunchBar has been around for a while.

While Spotlight searches the contents of files LaunchBar only indexes filenames and metadata, but as this includes things like Safari bookmarks and your iTunes library it's still incredibly useful. The beauty of it is that's accessed via a system-wide hotkey (Command-Space by default) which pops up a smart search bar at the top of the desktop. Just enter a few characters of what you're looking for, hit Enter and bam, LaunchBar opens it for you.

Want to fire up Safari? SAF is enough for it to be the first hit on LaunchBar's list. Want to hear "Polkas on 45" by Weird Al Yankovic? POLKA will find it for you. Want the BBC News website? NEWS will probably do the trick. What this means is that there's a whole lot less moving to and fro between keyboard and mouse, speeding things up considerably. It doesn't just search, though - you can navigate around the filesystem using the arrow keys, pick documents from an application's Recent Documents list, whatever. It's very, very intuitive, very, very clever and very, very useful.

The full functionality is hard to describe, but I highly recommend checking out the features list, then downloading the beta of version 4 and taking a bit of time to get to know it.

It is indeed a thing of beauty. I'll be registering Version 4 as soon as it's out of beta.

Posted by mpk at July 3, 2004 10:12 PM | TrackBack