Well, so much for QuickSilver, that great app that that François described a few post down. In a recent post on a mailing list, the developer recently mentioned that the future of the application was less than certain now that he’s too busy with other projects and that the current version “works well enough” for him. He did mention being interested in the new “branch”, basically a major new version, but that’s several months or a year or so away at best.

QuickSilver on Leopard has been less than perfect. For one thing, stability lately has become an issue and while the latest beta release (b.53) is quite a bit better, it still isn’t quite rock solid. One thing to note though is that the software is now open source, which will hopefully lead to a more stable release. One developer has started cleaning up the code so this does look promising. Can’t wait to see what comes out of this.

Meanwhile though, I had to start looking for alternatives. One of them is an old favorite of mine that had taken a backseat to QS for a while: LaunchBar. While not free, it’s quite solid, does most of what QS does (and in some cases, more) and doesn’t cost too much. At 19,95$, it would be a steal if not for QS’s no-cost license. It’s still a great deal none-the-less.

The problem with these software is that they take quite a while to learn and get used to. There’s a lot of shortcut keys, hidden tips and tricks and undocumented features that make them very powerful yet very intimidating. It’s the kind of software you need to use for a while before really using the software to it’s full potential. I’d wager that most people using either software aren’t even using 25% of what they can do. I know I’m certainly in that category.