Quicksilver -- A magical little program
This magical little program just flat-out rocks. First off, in a nutshell, it's an adaptive search launcher, meaning that it gets better and more efficient in finding things based on your past searches.
That alone is an exceptional feature. Being able to summon any program with the dash of a 3-5 keyboard keys! Talk about evocative! But the best feature is the command line. Any file, folder, or item you feed into quicksilver (which is as simple as selecting the item and evoking quicksilver) can have actions taken to it such as email, copy, compress. You can, in another access a massively broad range of manipulations even using indirect object (or another object you specify). This 1)speeds up your GTD on a mac like just 20-fold and it gets you into the programmer's mind-frame of inputting varibles, manipulating them and then optionally outputting them to a seperate node. Even more advanced is the plug-ins feature which enable you to run scripts, send instant messages, even dial phone numbers, and look up dictionary words. Combine this with the knick-knacks of automator, the versatility of the dashboard and then throw in the fact that frequently used quicksilver commands can be given a meta-shortcut to stifle you from wasting time opening the long way, you can do almost all computer actions from copying files to manipulating data to sending info to variables (such as a dictionary) with quicksilver, automator, dashboard, and occcasionally the dock! How's that for productivity.
My favorite aspect of quicksilver is it's emphasis on wu wei Taoism. That's totally me. I read the entire Tao te Ching and fell in love with that type of logic and then finding a computer program that's as quick and efficient as Taoist thinking that doesn't create screen or memory clutter but is as efficient as the Finder, I wanted to learn everything I could about it.
Here's a few demos I found Interesting.
Adding in iCAl Events from Quicksilver
This works for google calendar with the right plug-in, too. For ical, you just need the ical plug-in.
First off, simply click on the "iCal module" in the QS preference pane. Once that's installed, the protocal for text entry is "event - date". So to have dinner with Sally on july 3rd, it would go something like this "dinner with sally - 07/03/08 6:00pm. Then hit tab and type "ic" to queue up iCal so that quicksilver now knows you're adding an event, and then tab again to throw in the indirect variable of which calendar to use. I have a calendar called "Galvanizing!!!" so I just need to type tab and then "g" to link my new event to that calendar. Hit return and it's loaded in iCal for your all without even ever glancing at the actual iCAl program!! So now whenever you glance at iCal it can be to see what to do (or to fine-tune your calendar) instead of adding appointments! The speed and graceful execution of this program is amazing!
For learning other (all) commands, this
http://mysite.verizon.net/hmelman/QSRef.pdf
cheatsheet is very helpful.
