The software is pretty straight forward but here is a blurb from their site explaining a bit.

When you launch the application, you are asked for a random number. This number is the seed for the generation of the template. The same number will generate the same template again. This way, when you Bingo out you have a way to prove to others that you really did.

Keynote Bingo supports a nice list of languages including: Swedish, English, Finnish, Italian, Esperanto, German, Spanish, French (partial) and Klingon (yes really). Grab a copy of the Macworld 2008 version here.

The solution? Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba.

We’ve never reviewed Airfoil here and I always sort of wondered why. I know I couldn’t live without it now as the latest version released a couple of days ago is really a milestone. For starters with Airfoil 3 you can now stream music from any application (think Quicktime, VLC, or browser based last.fm or Pandora) on your Mac and send it to one or multiple Airport Express stations. And new in this version you can now stream to another Mac, or multiple Macs in sync , which I tested with my girlfriend this evening to waves of giddy girly laughter. By running Airfoil Speakers, a small new app included with Airfoil, the receiving Macs will stream what they are being sent, to just a slight delay depending on your network speeds. Oh and if you’re curious Airfoil Speakers.app wouldn’t work on my hacked AppleTV – I tried.

Also new in this version is video streaming. According to the guys at Rogue issues with Airfoil 2 that included problems with sync during video playback, have now been resolved. To do this Airfoil includes the Airfoil Video Player, which will keep the video locally in sync with remote audio. The player also has support for many of the most popular video formats, and includes early support for DVD streaming. From the testing I did here medium resolution h.264 podcasts, some medium resolution .AVIs, and even DVD all worked quite well over my 802.11G wireless network.

Airfoil 3 is also the programs Leopard update version with full support for 10.5.x featuring a refined interface and easier preference pane options. Overall Airfoil is a joy to run and it is almost a no brainer for any real music lover with an available Airport Express device. For $25 you really can’t go wrong. Upgrades for existing users is $10 unless you bought after 7/15/07 inwhich case it’s gratis. If you’re on the fence there is a limited trial version available to test the waters, but it only works for 10 minutes (boo!).

Check out our recent interview with Paul Kafafis, CEO of Rogue Amoeba or meet the company in person at this weeks MacWorld 2008 Expo (booth #2738 in the South Hall).

Measuring Cup is not fancy although there are a few commercial offerings that are. Instead it is a very lightweight and simple little app written in Cocoa that features a tree view organization of recipes with user defined categories and subcategories. The system is fully searchable and provides all of the features you would expect for a database app of its ilk. You can enter in the name of an item with units of measure, serving size, prep time, steps to prepare, calories and nutritional facts. There is a small square for a photo of your dish to finish off each entry.

One thing I noticed is that if you’re sharing recipes the import/export feature might be really handy if you know some other Measuring Cup users. Hit me up if you’re a user as I would love to test that out!

Their really are not any bells and whistles with Measuring Cup but I also don’t think their really needs to be. Measuring Cup runs on Tiger 10.4+ and is completely free, but I noticed the author receives donations from happy users looking for enhancements. So that’s about it for this simple program – If you’re handy in the kitchen you might want to check Measuring Cup out.

Open up Automator and choose a Custom project. Drag the following over to the right window:

• Under Library | Internet, drag over Get Specified URLs. Click the small pointer to open it up (if necessary), remove the default link to Apple and add entries for the sites you wish to open.
• Then drag over “Display Webpages” – nothing to configure there.
• Optionally, from Library | Utilities drag over “Show Growl Notification”, open it up and fill it in to give you a Growl notification when the sites have been loaded.

Go to the File menu, click Save as Plug-In, and save it as an iCal plug in. Whatever you type in the text box here will appear on your iCal calendar pages, and is also the name of the app file. In iCal set up the time you want this to fire and of course be sure to set it as a repeating event, if that’s what you want.

And if you don’t like the fact that it leaves Automator open in your menu bar, look at this post on macosxhints for instructions on how to fix that.

The nice thing about it is that if your default browser is Firefox then the links open in Firefox, not Safari.

I get asked this one a lot by web developers so I thought I would throw this up here for posterity. Not everyone wants to taint their Mac by running full blown Windows on it (am I right?), but if you’re a web developer it’s pretty critical that you build pages that render properly in Internet Explorer. If you have done this type of work on *nix you might remember using a great tool named ies4linux. Well you guessed it, ies4osx was recently ported to the Mac by Mike Kronenberg.

Note: This only works on Intel based processors. Sorry PPC users.

1. Tiger users will need to install X11 on their Macs. Leopard comes with X11 pre-installed so carry on to step 2 if you are running OS X 10.5.x.
2. Download and open Darwin 0.9.49_2.
3. Copy Darwin to your Applications folder.



4. Download and install ies4osx.
5. Choose your browser and language and click the play button. If you click the log icon you will see ies4osx is downloading all of the needed components for the browsers. Depending on your connection this may take a while, so grab a soda or something.



6. In your Applications folder you should now see the available browsers. Ahhh web developer bliss.

The browsers will install the components necessary to run Flash, and everything should work nearly identically as it would under Windows, except the system fonts will be pulled from your Mac. Most importantly IE will render as it would under Windows. In my case I have been hacking CSS bugs via this method for a few weeks, and I can say it is a great deal better for me than attempting to do this under Parallels or another virtual machine. Another bonus is that an X11 virtual machine running IE uses only about 25mb of system memory on my system, a heckuva lot less than any other solution.

Oh and as far as I know you can’t do this under Windows quite nearly as easily as this – which I suppose is more than a little ironic.

ies4osx is free and licensed under the GPL. Be sure to check out Mike’s blog for updates.

The only real caveat to the gameplay is that you can move two vertices at once by holding shift when selecting them. Also don’t be surprised if you don’t fare that well when playing Tangle – after about an hours worth of playing I was only able to reach the 6th game board! In fact according to the developers you will never see the same game board twice, so in that respect Tangle offers unlimited play value.

In multiplayer mode Tangle allows you to challenge a friend by playing an identical play-field and seeing who can untangle it the fastest. I think this might be the best feature of the game, and I found this the most enjoyable mode of play. You can even taunt your opponent via text chat allowing for some good old fashioned trash talk.

While Tangle is quite a fun distraction I think the asking price of $20 is a bit steep, especially after I came across this TUAW post by Erica Sadun describing Planarity, a free online flash game, which is virtually identicle to the single player experience of Tangle. Having said that, I still think the shareware version if Tangle is worth the download, and it operates fully functional for 1 hour of gameplay.

With a registered version Tangle allows you to upload your high scores to its leaderboard to show off your prowess to other Tanglers. Tangle is available as shareware from mc hot software.

Overflow really is an elegant, easy to use launcher for Mac OS X. It’s a great solution for those who want an uncluttered dock but still want easy access to must have apps. The major new features are – right after the jump.

• Dragging a file over Overflow’s dock icon now instantly opens the Overflow window to allow the file to be dropped on an application or folder contained in Overflow, making it an even more natural extension to the dock.
• The Overflow dock icon can now be hidden and replaced by a status menu item.
• The Overflow window can now be automatically positioned under the mouse when the hotkey is pressed.
• Items in Overflow can now be assigned custom names.

Full 2.5 release notes here. You can see a video overview of Overflow here.

The release is of course free for all paid Overflow customers. New customers can purchase Overflow 2.5 (Universal) from Stunt Software for $14.95, or check out the trialware.

Back then I put the question to Mudi, one of the devs behind ForkLift, and he came through with some really great suggestions for me (thanks dude!). What follows are some beginner’s recommendations and a brief outline for those interested in learning to build wicked cool programs for Mac’s OS X.

First of all some background. Wikipedia says it better than I ever could:

“Cocoa is Apple Inc’s native object-oriented application programming environment for the Mac OS X operating system. It is one of five major APIs available for Mac OS X; the others are Carbon, Toolbox (for the obsolete Classic environment), POSIX (for the BSD environment), and Java. (Environments such as Perl and Ruby are considered minor environments because they are not generally used for full-fledged application programming.)

Cocoa applications are typically developed using the development tools provided by Apple, specifically Xcode (formerly Project Builder) and Interface Builder, using the Objective-C language. However, the Cocoa programming environment can be accessed using other tools, such as Python, Perl and Ruby, with the aid of bridging mechanisms such as PyObjC, CamelBones and RubyCocoa, respectively. It is also possible to write Objective-C Cocoa programs in a simple text editor and build it manually with GCC or GNUstep’s makefile scripts.

For end-users, Cocoa applications are considered to be those written using the Cocoa programming environment. Such applications usually have a distinctive feel, since the Cocoa programming environment automates many aspects of an application to comply with Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.”

So if you are going to be learning to write next generation applications for OS X you will need the following:

• A strong background with Objective C
• A fluent understanding of Cocoa and the other APIs used to interact with OS X.
• Xcode (currently 2.4.1) – This is Apple’s app development environment, where you will be doing pretty much all of your work.
• Interface Builder (bundled with Xcode) – Can you guess what this does?
• A membership (free or paid) to Apple’s Developer Connection site.
• Some great textbook style books to get you off and running (my favorites reviewed below).
• A ridiculous amount of caffeine fueled beverages and an understanding spouse.

Objective C Books

Programming in Objective-C
by Stephen Kochan | $23.00

Written like a text book Kochan’s Programming in Objective-C is one of the best programming books I have ever read, and the book has a good reputation. I hadn’t done any work in C/C++ since the early 1990′s and I was honestly up to speed with Object Orientated C in no time. The book is positioned at beginners, so if you have zero experience in C or programming in general you should still be fine with this one, but you may need to re-read several chapters. Although he starts off fast with some fundamentals the author wastes little time with fluff and each chapter is really packed with information. Aside from a couple of errors (see below) the example code is also really well put together and clear in the principles it is trying to convey.

As this was recommended by virtually everyone as the only book to buy for learning Objective C it was the first one I picked up on the subject. I found that I came away with enough experience and confidence to push forward into Cocoa and get started building real Mac apps.

One problem I had with this book is that there were a couple errors in the exercises that had me a bit stumped. Luckily I found the errata on Stephen’s website. Another thing you should know is that this book does not go over Cocoa at all but it is somewhat implied that you will be wanting to build apps on OS X. So for the most part the book is not platform dependent in any way.

The bottom line is, you will not be much of a Mac developer without a strong background in Objective C, and this is the reference that will help you get there. Highly recommended.

Objective-C Pocket Reference
by Andrew M. Duncan | $27.63

I have always been a sucker for O’Reilly’s pocket quick reference guides. I found that having it available on my desk really helped me read Stephen’s Programming in Objective-C I recommend above. They are perfect companions. So keep in mind that this is a 128 page reference book covering stuff like syntax, objects, memory and exception handling, and not a text book. Having said that there were a few things I just didn’t grasp until they were outlined for me in this book. This guide really became an important desk reference once I started building.

I have no gripes with this book – clear, concise, inexpensive and easy to read.

Cocoa Books

Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (2nd Edition)
by Aaron Hillegass | $26.93

This book is very well known in Mac development circles and that’s why I mention it first. It is likely the book that most developers read first once they have a foundation built in Objective C programming. The book serves as a very good introduction to the Cocoa framework and XCode, and provides some really well written examples. If you are just starting out I would really recommend this book as Aaron is honestly a very talented teacher. I went through the exercises in this book coming away knowing that I had really mastered the subjects covered.

However, don’t expect him to go too deep in to each concept, as he tends to gloss over a few things I wish were expanded on a bit. Also some people might say that the book is a bit dated and even though it is revised, there are a couple of areas it lacks. The book was written before Xcode 2.0 and a couple of the examples demonstrate that, but in all honesty, it’s not a big problem to overcome. I also wish Aaron had provided source examples somewhere online, but I guess forcing me to type the exercises out by hand makes them stick a bit better too.

All in all highly recommended for programmer’s switching over to Mac and other beginners.

Cocoa Programming
by Scott Anguish, Erik Buck, Donald Yacktman | $99.00

Cocoa Programming is a really large SAMS book that weighs in at nearly 5 lbs. Thankfully all of the bulk is not wasted on preaching or fooling around as this book has long been considered one of the best Cocoa books you can buy. People have told me that this book has really cleaned up any final issues or misconceptions they had using Cocoa, and really added to their toolsets.

I constantly found that the authors went above and beyond explaining the classes and protocols of Cocoa, and many of the examples I find actually using in my applications. You really get the sense that the guys writing the material are crack programmers with years of experience. The most interesting areas of the book for me were the sections on Client/Server networking, and some of the Appkit stuff (which they obviously cover in-depth).

The problem with this book is that it was written in 2002. So this is way back in the OS X 10.1-10.2 days, and some of what is covered is completely deprecated. This along with the hefty price were almost enough for me to not even consider buying it. The thing that redeems this book is that it covers valid subjects with entire chapters that newer books do not even mention. The truth is when it comes to actually sitting down and doing the work I find myself constantly coming back to this one.

Additional Resources

Well I hope this helps would be OS X programmers to get started. It really seemed daunting at first but you will be in the thick of things in no time. Some final web based resources I found invaluable:

• Again – Apple’s Developer Connection website, read this getting started guide. Check back often.
• The developer related areas of the Apple mailing lists were often useful.
• Andy Matuschak has a written an excellent friendly guide to getting started with Cocoa.
• Macdevcenter.com – This is the O’Reilly networks contribution to developing on Mac. An essential resource with regular updates.
• CocoaDev.com – A Cocoa resource site with an old school styles bulletin board.
• Cocoadevcentral.com – One of the best resources out there. Excellent tutorials and articles with reader comments in a blog styled layout. Both internal and external sources.
• The Mac programming forum on MacRumors has some great discussions with lots of active users.
• iDevApps is another popular and active forum for Mac developers.
• #macdev on Freenode, one of the biggest IRC channels for Mac development.
• There is even a podcast for Cocoa developers although it is becoming less and less updated.
• Update: Alex Clarke has pointed out his excellent Open Sourced project called BecomeAnXcoder. The PDF based guide is aimed at true beginners, comes in five languages, and is really very well written (I just printed it off). Thank’s Alex, not sure how I never came upon this.

What resources help you sharpen your OS X programming skills?

The hack grants you full iPhone usage: Calls in/out, SMS in/out, Edge, etc. I can see a few people on the Bladox forums as well as Hackint0sh forums have done this successfully. I also saw a few people unlocking and discussing this on Undernet in #iphone.TurboSIM. So to reiterate the iPhone has been fully unlocked but you will require a blank TurboSIM, some ssh skills, and you must physically cut both your AT&T and personal SIM card to fit the TurboSIM. For a great How-To on how this is done see this thread at Hackint0sh.

Also before you try this yourself you might consider that a full software hack requiring no special hardware, cannot be far off now (days?). In fact, another well known iPhone hacker (Not from the ‘Official’ iPhone Dev Team), who wishes to remain nameless, said this to me in IRC just now:

<doc> I just ordered a TurboSIM!
<doc> hehe
<doc> well it’s looking fairly legit no?
<xxxxxx> but we’ll have the unlock before it gets to you
<doc> oh ya?!
<doc> damn dude I’m impressed
<doc> like a software only unlock?
<xxxxxx> we’ll see…
<doc> oh man the suspense

Congratulations to all the people who have been working non-stop on this! it sure has been interesting watching it unfold.

eSATA-II is rated at a theoretical speed of up to 3.0GB/s but you can expect to achieve real world write speeds of up around 80mb/s. Firewire 800 is rated at 80MB/s but most benchmarks I see have it around 30-40MB/s. USB 2.0 hobbles in around 15-20MB/s. So in the real world eSATA-II is about five times faster than USB 2.0 and nearly three times faster than Firewire800. After testing all of these connections independently I can tell you that jumping to eSATA-II over USB/Firewire really is worth it.

You can buy a two port eSATA-II card for your Mac’s ExpressCard slot (pictured here) for around $50 or more. ExpressCard slots can be found on both 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros equipped with a PCI-Express bus. I am not partial to any brand, and as near as I can tell, they are using the si3132 chipset, and use the same driver. You may want to check out Apiotek as they have a card that enables RAID, as well as passes on your drive’s SMART status to the OS. Once you get yourself a card simply plug it in, load the driver, plug in your external hard drive, and you should be up and running.

For an external hard drive enclosure I went with a unit from Vantec because of the great price point and simple design, but there are really plenty of better enclosures to choose from. Be sure you buy one that supports eSATA-II and not simply eSATA if you want maximum throughput. You may also want a fan in yours but since I work in a cool environment this didn’t seem necessary. I stuffed in a Seagate 750GB and have been really pleased ever since.

Benchmarks

How pleased? Take a look at the numbers below which I tested with my MacBook Pro. I pitted 4 drives against eachother:

• The stock internal eSATA Hitachi 160GB in the MacBook Pro
• External Maxtor 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Firewire 400
• External Western Digital Passport 160GB 5400RPM USB 2.0
• External Seagate 750GB 7200RPM 16MB eSATA-II (SATA-300)

Sorry I don’t have benchmarks for Firewire800 available but most XBench tests run around 32MB/s for sustained transfers. Also keep in mind that benchmarking in XBench is by no means a perfect test, but all drives were erased and all applications closed for all passes.

Internal Hitachi 160GB 5400RPM 8MB SATA-I (SATA-150)

External Maxtor 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Firewire 400

External Western Digital Passport 160GB 5400RPM USB 2.0

External Seagate 750GB 7200RPM 16MB eSATA-II (SATA-300)

Conclusion

Now it is important pointing out that you will need a newer MacBook Pro with a PCI-Express bus to use eSATA-II. For those of you with 15″ MacBook Pros that came minus a Firewire 800 port this should be really appealing. You can see from the benchmarks above that you should actually achieve better transfer rates with an external SATA-II setup than with your Mac’s own stock internal drive. Another good tip is to be sure and set your scratch drives to this new drive for some of your memory hungry apps like Photoshop and Final Cut Pro to see a real nice speed boost.

For another good comparison of these transfer mediums with benchmarks over other connections, see this thread.

If you are just another Apple fanboy waiting on the unlock you may want to start at the iPhone Dev Wiki.

I found a detailed list of alternative iPhone activation methods fully detailing Jon’s method for those willing to try. Hat tip to Infinite Loop. I also see the Register picked this up yesterday when it broke.

When this particular iPhone Engineer first arrived at the party I saw them be asked several times to get out their iPhone and show everyone, a request to which they diligently declined every invitation. After the group had calmed down a bit I observed the Apple Engineer talking with another party-goer who asked them every-one’s favorite question, “What’s up with Apple not allowing third party Cocoa Apps on the iPhone?”

The iPhone engineer’s face went somber and replied “Wait. All I can say is just wait. We haven’t done everything we are going to do… The iPhone Application story is not over.”

The party-goer tilted his head to the side, obviously wanting more details and asked “So, are there going to be third party Cocoa apps on the iPhone?”

The iPhone team-member smiled and responded simply “Yeah. There will be.”

When pressed to tell when “there will be” third party iPhone apps the engineer declined to answer anything more than “Soon”.

So how soon is “soon”? Who knows, we don’t even know Apple’s reasons for not allowing iPhone Cocoa development. It could be security concerns as they have discussed in the past or to ensure a consistent and high-quality user experience as some pundits have purposed. Personally I would guess it’s a combination of these two factors and the result of the Mac OS X teams being overworked already between Leopard and iPhone development and not having the time to create an iPhone SDK. Whatever the reasons for the current lack of third party openness, it does definitely seem that Apple wants to see great third party apps like Delicious Library and Frenzic on the iPhone, basking in their native Cocoa glory, as much as we do.

Guess what, chances are he does. Or is about to.

There’s always some little weasel of a sys-admin just waiting to inform “the man” of just how much time you, his star employee, is actually NOT spending justifying that paycheck. Just imagine when the schmuck presents ream after ream of printed logs of your questionable online antics. IRC, MSN Messenger, AOL Messenger, YouTube, pr0n, and the list goes on. You get the picture. Now before you fire up Monster.com on your soon to be former employer’s dime, there is thankfully an answer.

SSH Tunneling
The concept is simple. All your activities are sent through an encrypted SSH tunnel to some remote server which in turn does all the dirty work (so to speak). The beauty of course is that all that nuisance of a sys admin can ever see is a bunch of encrypted traffic.

Now here’s what you need:

• openSSH client. (thankfully OS X has this built in!)
• access to an openSSH server

For item 2 we are going to assume you have access to an offsite server somewhere that you can log in to via SSH. Perhaps you have a dedicated server at a hosting company? Maybe a Linux or FreeBSD box at home. You could even run an openSSH server on a Windows machine. Of course you could also use the Mac you have at home too! If you really don’t have access to a fast box to surf via, Google will likely lead to some free solutions. The only caveat to whatever box you use as a server is that it has to be configured to allow you to login via ssh. That’s it, that’s all.

Now in case you aren’t grasping this. The “client” is your computer at work. The “server” is the other machine we will tunnel to.

Getting Started
First you will need to create the tunnel. We need to know the name or IP address of the server you will be tunneling to, as well as your login name and password on that server. For this example we will assume your login name is william and the server name is www.myserver.com.

Now enter the following into your terminal window.

ssh -D 8080 -f -C -q -N william@www.myserver.com

You will then be prompted for your password, which you should enter. That’s it! Your ssh tunnel is in place!

A quick synopsis of what those switches mean is as follows:

-D 8080 : This basically does a lot of dynamic stuff and makes it behave as a SOCKS server. Of course you could use any non privileged port here (above 1023).
-f : This will fork the process into the background after you type your password.
-C : Turns on compression.
-q : Quiet mode. Since this is just a tunnel we can make it quiet.
-N : Tells it no commands will be sent. (the -f will complain if we don’t specify this).

So now that the tunnel is made we will need to configure Firefox to use this tunnel. Since we are cool we will dispense with the GUI config tool and just configure it directly. To do this open Firefox and type the following into the address bar:

about:config

You will see a LOT of config options so you will need to filter it a bit. Type “proxy” into the filter bar.

You will see something like this.

We are interested in these 6 items set to the following values:

network.proxy.no_proxies_on : localhost, 127.0.0.1, 192.168.0.0/24, .yourcompany.com
network.proxy.socks : 127.0.0.1
network.proxy.socks_port : 8080
network.proxy.socks.remote_dns : true
network.proxy.socks_version : 5
network.proxy.type : 1

network.proxy.no_proxies_on
This specifies which addresses etc. to NOT use the proxy (tunnel) with. At a bare minimum it should have “localhost, 127.0.0.1″. I added 192.168.0.0/24 as an example of the subnet address range I have at work. I obviously wouldn’t want to go through the tunnel if I am trying to get to a local address! That just wouldn’t work at all. The same would hold true if your company used a local DNS server to resolve host names of computers on your local subnet. In that case you would also want to add something like “.mycompany.com” which would NOT use the tunnel for any address in the “mycomnpany.com” domain.

network.proxy.socks
The IP Address of your SOCKS proxy (tunnel). In this case your local machine (127.0.0.1)

network.proxy.socks_port
The port number you assigned to the tunnel. 8080 in our example.

network.proxy.socks.remote_dns
This part is important because even though your traffic would be encrypted through the tunnel, that pesky sysadmin could still see you were doing DNS lookups for GirlsGoneWild.com! Setting this to “true” will send all your DNS traffic through the tunnel too. This feature is only supported on SOCKS5 so if your remote server only supports SOCKS4 then you’re out of luck with this feature.

network.proxy.socks_version
Self explanatory. Try to use version 5 if you can. If for some reason your remote server doesn’t support this version then use version 4 instead.

network.proxy.type
This basically turns all this stuff on or off. 1 = on. 0 = off. If for some reason you need to stop using a proxy then just set this to “0″. You can still leave all the other stuff set as it will just be ignored until you set this to “1″ again.

Well that’s it! Open Firefox and go to whatismyip. If you see the IP of your remote server then hallelujah THE MAN is finally off your back! If you see the address you usually get (the address of your company firewall) then something went wrong. Go back and double check that you did everything correctly. Also in a terminal check that your tunnel is still up.

ps -aux | grep ssh

If you don’t see the command you used to open the tunnel then it has closed and you will need to re-open it again.

Now back to the bit on the side. You can also configure MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Thunderbird etc. to use the same tunnel (no need for opening any more). Just go and configure their particular connection settings to use a SOCKS proxy too!

There’s a lot more that can be done from here like configuring things on the server for keeping the connection alive, as there are some cases where your network will cause things to time out. You could also setup your server to allow a key based login so you could have your tunnel open when you start up your computer. For now we have covered just enough to get you going without overloading on too many superfluous concepts.

Happy secure tunneling!

Quicksilver does have somewhat of a learning curve, but as with most apps with a learning curve, once you do “learn” the program, you can’t be without it. Quicksilver is accessed by a quick key stroke (default is Ctrl + Space) and from there you are greeted with the main window (named Primer). From here is where the “magic” happens. Quicksilver has a plethora of built in features, but one of its strong points would have to be the massive array of plugins, enhancements, other UI’s, etc. that can be installed and make Quicksilver even more powerful.

Quicksilver at the basic core is considered an application launcher, but there are so many things you can do after you type in the application’s name, that it is sometimes amazing. It has a search features, and you can look up documents, pictures, etc. and move them somewhere else, you can rename them, you can make them invisible…there is just so much you can do with Quicksilver.

I strongly suggest anyone who hasn’t yet tried Quicksilver out, to click the link above, download it, and I’m sure your future Mac computing will forever be altered (in a good way, of course…!). Please check out Quicksilver.