Explaining QS is hard, because the windows search and spotlight seem so limited in comparison.



in that pic, is one of the screens where you can expand or contract the scope of what pops up in QS. The granularity is /awesome/. I actually use QS and spotlight for different reasons.



this is opening an app, but showing some of the options and the default action (which is currently set to open)



mail.app with growlmail - im sending myself junkmail, to illustrate the frontmost windows that dont take focus away from what im doing, but display whats going on and allow me to not interrupt my other stuff for crappy email.

QFT.

Quicksilver can be almost whatever you want it to be.

Think of it as a tool that will take any object you want -- it can be a file or an arbitrary string of text -- and then perform almost any action you like on or with that object.

Beyond that, the implementation is supremely intelligent. It's very good at deducing, from its own rules and your past actions, both what object you want to find and, once you've found it, what you want to do with it.

You can use it as a search mechanism, an app launcher, a text entry device, an iTunes remote, or even a rudimentary IM or email client when the real thing is too big and bulky to invoke.

Furthermore, you can assign trigger hotkeys to virtually any series of actions you can do in Quicksilver, and it can control most popular Mac apps.

An amazing tool. It's not being actively developed but works OK with 10.5 for the most part. I hope someone updates it for 10.6 when that OS appears.

Quicksilver sounds nice. Too bad I don't have anything that runs OS X. Too bad Apple won't allow me to run it legally on my Thinkpad...

That sort of workflow is how I operate, I use keyboard shortcuts for more things than I can think of. Winkey+whatever is my friend.

Oh, Hoekey is awesome too. Arsian-developed!

Growl is indeed awesome, but you do need to spend some time setting it up for each application, which I'm betting some people forget to do.

I don't like Growl.

The one thing that really, really pisses me off about using this WinXP box at work is the neverending pop-up bubbles coming from the systray, most of which I can't disable because I don't have the proper credentials.

It's like an annoying puppy.

I don't want my computer bothering me about something. There is absolutely nothing, other than perhaps meeting reminders and new important work emails, that I NEEDTOKNOWRIGHTNOW. A dock badge with the big red circle takes care of the latter, and I probably want something less ephemeral than a Growl box for the former. Otherwise, I don't care if a download completed or someone signed into IRC or whatever. If it's that important, I'll check it, but otherwise let me get my work done without windows popping up all over the damn place.

Then you love growl, because for most applications, its fairly granular as to what kind of messages go up. You can also turn off messages on a per app basis.

Also, you can set more options for how obtrusive the window is, with time, opacity, location, and some that peep out of the menubar.

And growl window never take focus, and really, arent a bother to work since you put them where it's useful for you.

Nope - Stick Excel on the quick launch section and drag-n'-dope it.

I think it was on the Old New Thing that turning off DDE in excel caused a really weird error message from the shell when doing something...

Ugh, have to look it up...This message has been edited. Last edited by: jsymolon,

Yes, you're right, I should install Growl and configure it until I have exactly what I want... a system with no popup reminders.

Oh, wait, that's what I already have.

Apple doesn't even need to buy it. As I understand it, they chose BSD for the licence in the hope that Apple would take it on.

An integrated notifications framework is one of the things that a good source (Drunken Batman) was predicting for Leopard.

As it is, it's used in a number of Apple apps, but not at the system level.

"The one thing that really, really pisses me off about using this WinXP box at work is the neverending pop-up bubbles coming from the systray, most of which I can't disable because I don't have the proper credentials."

Right click your menu bar, on the taskbar pane choose customize then change the behavior to either always hide or hide when inactive. With the latter, there's also a hide when inactive checkbox that needs to be checked. I hide almost all of these except for my wireless, outlook and IM. You can't disable them from being there, but you probably have control over how the menu presents these.

No need having valuable menu space taken up by these. I want to see all 20 windows I have open in this menu bar.

If you disable DDE in Excel and try to open a file by double clicking it you get an error that the file could not be found, because the file type information for .xls specifies using the open DDE command to preform its action.

It can be fixed by changing the properties for the Open action in the File Types window. Uncheck the Use DDE option and add the "%1" to the end of the command line.

Raymond lays it out.

Of course, the simplest thing is to just make the QuickLaunch icon a new shortcut to Excel.exe, and not re-use the one in the start menu. Then you don't have to care about DDE at all. Things dropped on the QL get a new Excel window, and worksheets double-clicked in Explorer show up wherever they want.This message has been edited. Last edited by: HitScan,