Sapiens: Review and Giveaway
The most well-known application launcher is Quicksilver, which allows users to use keyboard commands to control almost every aspect of their Mac. There are many competitors; however, until now Quicksilver always seems to come out on top. Recently, Donelleschi has released an interesting new application launcher. Known as Sapiens, the launcher uses a graphical representation of apps and works though mouse gestures and a graphical interface.
Sapiens first innovation is its unique mouse gesture and interface. To open the launcher, you make a simple circular mouse gesture that actually works the first time, every time. Once open, the circular interface shows the user the current application as well as applications it thinks you may want to open next. Sapiens also is intelligent and learns what applications you use in relation to what application is active. In my experience, it took about two days before Sapiens became intelligent enough, but once it learned, it kept adapting to any changes I made and always had the next application I wanted to use in the launcher.
The default interface is known as “Trinity.” This layout always puts applications in the same place, allowing kinesthetic memory to take effect. In time, you will just know where to look to find any application. The search box becomes visible if you type while Sapiens is active. This is handy while the program is still learning, but I found no need for it after the initial few days. In addition, if you start dragging a file, initiate Sapiens by mouse gesture, and then drag the file on the icon of the program you want to use to open the file.
Overall, I think Sapiens is a very promising application. If you are tired of using Quicksilver or find a text-based launcher unattractive, I recommend you give Sapiens a try. It is available as a free trial from Donelleschi and costs $19.95 to register (during the limited introduction period). Thanks to the developer, we have one free Sapiens license to give away to a lucky reader. All you have to do is leave a comment answering the question below before October 20th at 10 AM to be eligible to win.
Sapiens takes 2-3 days (it really depends on how often you use your Mac daily) to have a enough brain power to make accurate predictions. What could we do to reduce this time?
To reduce the time… have the app scan the hard drive to see when was the last time specific programs were launched. That way it’ll have a baseline and then keep going. Alternatively Sapiens can ask the user to specify which apps they use most and then go from there but this way needs user interaction.
One might supply predefined user profiles the user could choose upon installation, asking just a simple question: what is it that you do? E.g., the user might choose to be a Web Developer, a Graphics Designer, a Writer or a Software Developer. From this information, Sapiens might already deduce some most-likely used applications. Match this list to the installed applications and Sapiens will be much more useful right from the start.
@ Slevin: But to be honest, for the first few days I used it, it still worked pretty well. And the text search feature (Which isn’t supposed to be used much) has been so very well implemented.
@Leif: I like the sound of that idea, the ability to group applications into different sections would more than likely aid Sapiens to making a more informed decision. Nice idea.
You could find a way for users to import the abbreviations and things they’ve already taught Quicksilver/Launchbar. That would reduce the time spent on the accuracy of typed searches to about zero, and since those are faster to use, it’s also faster to correct Sapiens on the mouse-based part of the launcher and tell it what app you want.
Plus, it provides incentive to switch.
Hello,
I noticed that most of the time, when i open a new application its related to :
- A : what’s on my clipboard.
- B : the type of document in my current application.
So may be Sapiens should check the type of contents in the clipboard or the type of document the current app is linked to (images, text or video)
Cheers,
Franck
It may help to respect the time and the weekday. In the morning hours the first thing I do is often to check for new mails. In the after noon I often use the Google Reader to read my feeds.
(BTW: It would also be helpful to define websites as application e.g. Google Reader, Banking Site, …)
Perhaps it could scan the “last accessed” data for files on initial use. That way it would get a good idea of application usage patterns from the very beginning
I might give this a try but since the only Mac I use is a laptop, I’m not sure this style of launcher makes much sense. Of course I’ve not tried it yet. It just seems that with the growing numbers of laptops sold that a launcher that is catered to the touchpad would get the win. If this works well then great but from reading about it, I’m not sold on it. Something more like Quicksilver gets my attention since my fingers are there on the keyboard already.
I’ll try to check it out though. Maybe I’m wrong about this one.
Besides memory from search results, they could add compatibility for Spotlight’s engine.
Quite an interesting application but I keep comparing it to Quicksilver. Anyway, the mouse gesture thing is cool but most people are more accustomed to “keyboard” launchers.
I would be glad to get a free thing. I don’t even know what it is, but I appreciate it deeply already.
You could reduce time by allowing you to choose what shows up on the menu until the application gets smarter. Or just start with the most recently used applications.
Addition to my user profiles post: Sapiens could feed back the difference between the behaviour expected from the user’s profile choice and their actual behaviour to the Sapiens server and use that to further improve the actual profiles. Those could be fed back into the installer or directly into the already installed copies of Sapiens. Of course this approach would imply some privacy considerations.
I would like to try it, if it works fine on Japanese Mac OS X also…
Two minor but important corrections to inaccurate statements in this post:
1. Calling Quicksilver an application launcher is really like calling a Mac a calculator. It was designed to, and does well, so much more than that.
2. You say there are many competitors. Given that no other applications do what Quicksilver does in breadth or depth, there are functionally no competitors. People, for their own reasons, may choose to use applications other than Quicksilver to accomplish some (but never all) of the same tasks, but there is no level playing field on which to “compete” with Quicksilver.
Use the network. I would bet lots of mac users have similar work flows for given types of users (eg. graphic artists, programmers, video production, etc.). Capture already “learned” groupings and use those as a baseline for new users. Then just refine them. I would think this is better than starting from scratch each time.
Look for trends on the user’s dock, many user’s group their applications into little clusters. I for example have internet->work->design->system.
It could train itself by a) looking at what icons are on the desktop and dock. b) asking the user which apps they use frequently.
Sapiens could train itself better by allowing users to manually set motions, etc.
Have a precompiled list of related applications, this way it could start with default smart settings and then refine with time…
Use your mac like crazy for a day… duh!
Aggregate the applications profiles on a centralized server. Citing whether you are a web developer or the like seems to be redundant, because it would be more accurate to base the findings on a per application level rather than overall profile. On the server though, it could keep information about what MOST people might use with photoshop etc or the like.
How to cut down the time? Simple – use Quicksilver instead.
Looks eerily similar to trampoline in my opinion.
Nothing¦ what’s two to three days in the greater scheme of things?
A few suggestions on making it smarter:
1. Exclude apps that launch at login. It lists 1Passwd and Quicksilver in Sapien. These open at login so I have no need for them to be inside a launcher.
2. Allow users to remove certain applications from being shown as options. System Profiler shows up for me because I used it before installing Sapien. Haven’t used System Profiler in months though.
3. Scan the HDD, or even just Applications, for things that are frequently updated or accessed.
4. Better yet, get info from Slife or Wakoopa on what the user uses a lot and prioritise these over other apps.
5. For some reason it suggests Safari, even though I use FireFox. Perhaps keep a list of apps that do the same function (different browsers (safari, the fox, etc), word processors (Word, Pages, Mellel, NeoOffice)) and give preference to those which are more often accessed over the others. If I want to view a single link, I’ll sometimes do this in Safari because it launches faster than firefox. If I want to browse the web a fair bit, I will always go for FireFox. In this instance, it should always recommend FireFox.
Another example of this is Preview and Skim. I usually fire up Preview when viewing PDFs because it doesn’t take up the full screen. For serious reading, though, I prefer skim. In this case, the only way for Sapien to learn which app to display is for me to actually tell it.
6. Slight annoyance: The text input is great, but horribly slow on my MacBook.
7. I know the point of it is to use the mouse, but for us laptop users, can you make navigating the app choices using the keyboard easier? If I have three clusters to the top, bottom left and bottom right, why can’t I then press corresponding keys to bring one of those clusters to the focus in the centre and then choose one of the apps to launch? If the app I want is 2nd in line in the top clusters, it takes 4 presses of the down button to get it into focus.
8. Use Spotlight to find out what the Top Hits are for individual letters (like A = AppZapper, not Activity Monitor, or whatever).
To reduce the time for sapiens to get to know your Mac using habits, I would recommend simulating typical tasks that you might do on your Mac from a day-to-day basis.
In my case one of the most frequently used apps is NetNewsWire and so I will open that, then open iChat. I will then start to read my RSS feeds and when I come across an interesting article I launch Safari and read it in there.
Sapiens takes a look at all this and cleverly decides what apps should go where.
A few things that may make this app learn a little faster:
1. Perhaps a scan of the “recent items” or “recent applications” that are found in the apple menu — typically, listed in chronological order.
2. Perhaps a scan for ReLaunch sets or other groupings of apps (as in Overflow), to make the early guessing more likely on-target.
3. Potentially, a collective database of what other users do, and presumptive guesses made of this pre-defined behavior?
looks interesting. will give it a spin. see if it works out better than quicksilver
Make Sapiens go social: Gather information from users to create a main database of correlations between apps. Tie into services like Wakoopa (has been mentioned before).
But basically, try to predict usage based on “similar users”. Profiling can be done by scanning the HD and seeing “Is this a developer?” or “Is this a family computer?”.
Depending on a list of predefined profiles, Sapiens should determine what kind of use this computer is being put to.
Then show those app families. Chances are the user will have to teach the app less.
Check the harddisk for the most recently used application or files.
I would find some app that can launch certain apps at certain times and have this launcher app launch the apps when I would. This would help Sapiens know what time everyday I open what apps.