One of the most useful little utilities on the Mac is called Quicksilver. It allows you to get at programs or data with a very few key presses and also indexes all of your user data such as contacts, calendar entries etc. So if I want to find a phone number, I can just type the persons name from anywhere, hit return and their contact record shows up instantly. The idea is so good that Apple have stolen it for the next version of OS X, it will be called Spotlight. This obviously takes advantage of OS X’s file store which Windows can’t even get close to currently. But there is a utility which gets some of the way there…
Called AppRocket it sits at the top of your screen and at least allows you get at your applications and documents in your My Documents folder quickly. Well worth a look.
PC-Com is another useful program for Windows. It can do almost everything that Quicksilver can, and it even has a few extra features, like a macro recorder and note creator. You can find PC-Com at http://www.boletrice.com/pccom.
Launchy is a free alternative. Skinnable, add your own directories and file types etc.. http://www.launchy.net“ rel=”nofollow”>http://www.launchy.net
Nice one Steve and Josh,
Keep them coming guys. Although they are OK, there still doesn’t seem to be anything which even comes close to QuickSilver of Spotlight.
another alternative I like is Colibri.
http://colibri.leetspeak.org“ rel=”nofollow”>http://colibri.leetspeak.org
slickrun can do a LOT although you would not think that from its minimal looking interface.. you can also make batches of actions
http://www.bayden.com/slickrun“ rel=”nofollow”>http://www.bayden.com/slickrun
launchy apeared to be the best of this bunch imho..
The main difference that i find between these and the actual spotlight is that spotlight would search in the document not just the name for what you are searching for. So say if you have multiple .doc that talk about a guy named John and none were named John it would find the .doc ‘s that have john in the actual text and highlight it for you
Is there info on a launcher and quick silver app that uses the new vista control bar features?