Monday, November 8, 2004

One of those "holy shit" moments in computing

I had one of those "holy shit" moments in computing today when I installed Quicksilver using the tutorial of Dan Dickinson: The Primary Vivid Weblog: QuickSilver - A Better OS X In Just 10 Minutes. I've often thought about how a computing interface can better integrate the best aspects of graphical and command line interfaces. In some ways, Windows operating system has tried to tightly couple those things: you can access just about any menu item with the alt key and a letter. However, this doesn't really address the way you really want to work. You don't want to think about explicitly switching between applications and be able to access menu's like you do with a mouse. You want the nature of the computer to reflect whatever it is you are doing. In other words, you don't want to think about switching between web browser to email editor to send an email, you want to send a communication to someone and it would be nice if there was a way for you to let the computer know your wishes without a whole lot of: switch application, new email, write in name, etc. Quicksilver is a new method of tying common computing activities together in an easily accessible way.

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