Launchbar vs. QuickSilver
Posted April 4th, 2007 @ 02:08pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I use LaunchBar. It does all I need - quickly launch things or allow me to drag and drop. I can even add items to the party shuffle (though I wish I could disable certain functions, like "play" and a lot of the other iTunes shortcut).
{democracy:10}
Posted 04 Apr 2007 at 2:35pm #
Oh, NOW you've done it 😉
I've used LauchBar for 4 years. It is AWESOME. I spent a couple months with QuickSilver around 2 years ago and found that while I liked its "bezel" effect more than LaunchBar's look, that it was more complex and bit slower for my needs. It has no doubt improved substantially over the past 2 years but given LaunchBar is so effective, so fast, and always seems to have new things I discover it can do, I really have no need to even be tempted.
I also tried Spotlight as a launcher for like... a week. That was painful by comparison.
Posted 04 Apr 2007 at 2:43pm #
I use Butler.
Posted 04 Apr 2007 at 4:12pm #
I use LaunchBar as well. I tinkered around with Quicksilver but was frustrated that Quicksilver seemed to partition types of actions. For example in Launchbar if I want to listen to a song in iTunes I type in the first couple letters of the song. In Quicksilver I would first have to type in iTunes (or type in the first few letters of it) and then the name of the song.
LaunchBar seems to throw everything together (which I like). It seems that other users are reporting that QuickSilver is more powerful, but I was never able to figure it out. I read the tutorial and LaunchBar just seemed a lot more intuitive.
Posted 04 Apr 2007 at 6:35pm #
I've always used Launchbar. Tried Quicksilver a few times over the years but I've just never got the hang of it.
Launchbar does all I need and I suspect more that I've never bothered trying.
I'm a little concerned about the lack of updates to Launchbar. Emailed the developers some months ago now and was told a new version was coming out 'soon'.
Oh well.
Posted 04 Apr 2007 at 8:54pm #
I'm on the QuickSilver side of the fence. I haven't really tried LaunchBar though, not since ages ago. But I truly love the power of QuickSilver. Just recently the feature I've had use for which otherwise would be a bit more cumbersome:
1. Navigate/search to a folder with files
2. Use the comma-shortcut for adding multiple files to the "stack"
3. Use the "compress" plug-in to compress the files on the stack with tar and gnuzip
Other than that I control iTunes with it and QS reports the song that is playing through Growl, which allows me to skip separate tools for this. Among a lot of things 🙂
Posted 05 Apr 2007 at 7:47pm #
Most folks I know that use QS never really compared the two because QS was free. I recently convinced 2 friends to test LB for a week and they both switched and purchased.
Posted 06 Apr 2007 at 7:41pm #
I use LaunchBar. I tried QuickSilver a couple of times because it is supposed to be so powerful, but I never got it to make anything impressing within ten minutes of use and I'm not really prepared to spend two days learning how to work with a program when I already have one that does a similar job but learns how I work.
Posted 08 Apr 2007 at 1:23pm #
I use QuickSilver and mostly just for launching applications. I have used LaunchBar in the past. Both are overkill for just launching apps, but QS does a pretty good job staying out of my way and being free.
Posted 13 Jan 2008 at 3:50am #
I used QuickSilver for a while, but found that I just used it for launching Apps, and Spotlight works well for that. And I had problems with Quick Silver getting slow over time on a client's MacBook Pro C2D. Not sure what caused it, and later his Spotlight got slow too. Before digging deeply on that issue I helped him upgrade to Leopard. He hasn't commented on Spotlight since.
Spotlight was much faster for me after upgrading to Leopard.
I know about the "advanced features" of QuickSilver, but I found it more trouble than it's worth since I can launch the App with Spotlight and access most or all of the same features from the App itself, and all the tricks to do it will be available on every Mac that's running that App.
In other words, it's counter productive to form a dependancy to features the QuickSilver. Just learn the standard ways and you'll be better off IMHO.
Able
Posted 19 Jun 2008 at 1:37pm #
I use LaunchBar as well. QS is neat, but the speed and reliability of LB can't be beat.