January 15, 2004

LaunchBar

LaunchBar is a devestatingly simple program to describe: press command-space, and a dropdown menu appears. Type the first few letters -- generally two -- of the name of the application, hit return, and it launches the program. It's sort of like tab completion for the Mac, only it works better than tab completion in any shell I've regularly used. Like Simson Garfinkel's wonderful SBook5, Launchbar seems to have been designed to just do what the user thinks it should do, in almost all cases. OS X's directory structural is rather rigorously defined (as are most Unix boxes), so the first time you use it, LaunchBar has a guess about where your documents are and indexes them. It knows your bookmarks. It pulls your most recent selections to the top, out of alphabetical order. You can drag and drop files onto the menu, so I could type easily switch to using a piece of source code in BBEdit instead of XCode, or vice versa. You can keep hitting space to scroll through all open applications. Etcetera, etcetera. Except for adding my Projects directory to LaunchBar's index list, I haven't touched the preference. It just works. And it's a godsend -- Apple's keyboard navigation support is notoriously bad, and I've hunted and hunted for decent replacements for the Dock. This is it. If you're running OS X, try it; I think it'll entirely change the way you interact with everyday tasks on your computer.

posted at 8:42 PM | 1 comments

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