GeekForce

Everyone is all abuzz about Quicksilver these days.
It’s a launcher on steroids, that has its own object model which lives — it seems — on top of the Apple object model, a glorified DOM if you will. So, you use QS to do things like reference the currently running application, and ask it to tell you about its menus, and such. At its core its designed to allow you build fairly simple subject verb object “sentences” so to speak (at least this is what the QS crowd is calling them) and let them operate on your all the data and applications in your system.

QuickSilver is supposed to be faster than the finder, it searches your harddrive for all your applications, and your files, and some other things you probably didn’t know were there, and lets you search by just typing, and the results appear.
Once you’ve located The Subject you’d like to work with, using the tab key you tab down and start typing again to locate the verb - what action you want to take on the item you located above.

This all happens pretty quickly, and fairly elegantly.

My problem is, I just dont know what to do with it. I can think of lots of reasons to want to search for friends in my address book and then compose an email to them, but why should I have to use a third party application to do that? why dont I just do it in mail, where that belongs anyway? I mean exactly time is it saving to use QS, when I can open mail, click the compose button, and click the to button? Better yet, if i have LDAP integration, that’ll do name resolution for me…

I tried to think of some simple things that I do all the time, I’d like to be able to have a menu of servers that I remote into alot, and pick from them with some kind of elegant interface, but them Terminal does have the connect to server menu, and that seems to fit the bill really well - mostly because its really simple.

This is my whole problem with QuickSilver. It’s so complex, Rococo if you will, that using it save yourself time is nearly impossible, only because you cant figure out how to get it do what you want. It’s not like unix, where there’s 8 million ways to die, there’s only one way to do something, but its so wrapped in shrouds of mystery, that it’ll take you hours just to figure which shrouds to look behind…

It was only after hours of tweaking and reading what settings needed to go exactly where, that I figured out how to get one of the 5 or 6 examples that I tried to work well enough to go - hmmm powerful… - I dont know about you, but that’s not the reponse I want to have.

At any rate, I’d never used automator before, and since QS didn’t look to great, I thought i’d try using that.

All I have to say is WOW! Sure, it took me 4 hours to learn to write the code, but once I was done, it compiled without a hitch, and now I have a custom automator plugin that takes mail messages and creates iCal todo items from them.

Thats more than I can for about 3 or 4 days of really hacking around with QS.

My biggest problems with QuickSilver are these:
1) Impossible to search for things, if you’re typing slowly.
The search box always resets itself after a moment of no typing. This makes it really hard to use. There is a user configurable delay, but only up to 3 seconds. this problem alone makes it really frustrating to use this tool.
2) Search is not consistent.
Example: Type ‘Util’ into the Subject, you’ll get some applications, and whatever on your system matches that text, You’ll even get a few folders whose name contains util. But you’ll never see the ‘Utilities’ folder. So, I cant operate on the folder that I want to operate on, even if I did want to just open the folder in the finder.
If you’re going to advertise that you search everything on your harddrive, why not at least be consistent about it?
3) Too hard to make even demonstrations work on a default installation of QS.
As an example, Take Merlin Mann’s great Proxies demo. You cant make that work until you’ve done some interesting customization, you even have to change some of the OS’es settings to make it work…

In contrast, Automator is a simple, well scoped application, that does one thing, adn one thing only - workflow. it uses standard Apple API’s. So, not only can you reach in and grab anything from ANY application, but there’s no question that you can do something useful with it!
Automator does not use search, so it does not suffer from the problems that QS has when you are typing trying to find something.
Sure, it toook me 4 hours to learn applescript, but once i’d done that, I was up and running, and I only need about one debugging cycle to get them ironed out.

Anyway, for me right now, Automator is the shiznit. It’s tightly integrated with OSX, it has well defined object model, and it does not require that my hands be glued to the keyboard. Add to this the fact that I was able to do something interesting in about 4 hours, and hey - extra added bonus.