Monthly Archives: January 2009

Quick(silver) Search Box

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I saw the announcement come through yesterday for the “developer preview” of the new Google Quick Search Box for the Mac. I immediately downloaded it and started working with it, not fully knowing what to expect.

My initial response: wow, this could replace Quicksilver. For being a dev preview it seems quite impressive already. I did hear from a friend that it kept crashing on his computer, but it seems to be working just fine on mine.

A lot of the actions seem very similar to what you get with Quicksilver. At this point you don’t have any triggering or plugin capabilities, but from an application launcher standpoint, it is very nice. And it has the benefit of being a Google tool, where you can enter your Google account information, from multiple Google accounts, and it will index your Gmail, Docs, etc.

Then I saw this post about QSB today from Macworld, and it all made sense as I was reading the comments. Stated in comment number 2, referring to Nicholas Jitkoff, one of the devs working on QSB:

Nicholas is the guy that did Quicksilver, so this is the future if you are a Quicksilver fan.

Yep, I’m on board.

Put It In a Space

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I was first introduced to virtual desktops about 6 years ago when I first started poking at Linux. At the time it was a hobby type thing so I was basically running one or two applications at a time, and I didn’t see any real practical use for it.

In the last 9 months I’ve been buried in a major software implementation at work, and I’ve been consistently running more applications than I previously had. My dual-monitor setup started to seem too cramped, and seeing that I am running Mac OS 10.5 (the Leopard), I decided to take a stab at Spaces, and man I’ve been happy with the results. I’ve settled on a 4-desktop arrangement.

My Virtual Desktop Arrangment

Space 1 (top left): Being the “first” desktop, I’ve got my two main applications there, email (Entourage) and web browser (Firefox).

Space 2 (top right): Second most desktop I’ve got my various IM clients. I use iChat and Skype primarily, but will dip into Adium on occasion.

Space 3 (bottom left): This is where I do most of my interchange of applications. Shown in the photo is TweetDeck, and I will also pull up Terminal, TextWrangler, Finder, Excel, Word, etc. as I need. This tends to be my catch-all space.

Space 4 (bottom right): Primarily my remote desktop desktop. I use CoRD to connect to Windows servers and computers. If I am not using a remote desktop there I’ll shift some stuff over from Space 3.

Here are some free Windows options for running virtual desktops if you’ve never tried it out: Vista/XP Virtual Desktop Manager, VirtuaWin, Microsoft PowerToys.

Do you use virtual desktops? How do you have it arranged?

Update: I realize I talked about my dual-monitor setup, and this screenshot was taken when I was not at my desk.