(See Part II of this series for an update)
Everyone in my house has a Mac — except for me. AND I WANT ONE! I’ve been promised that once my office remodel is completed, I can get whatever Mac I want. Why do I want a Mac? There are a ton of reasons – here are the top two: 1) It just works. 2) QuickSilver.
After 18 years of messing with computers, networks, and programming, at times I grow very tired of trying to get things to work. Mac, for all it’s controversial issues, just works. It’s like a breath of fresh air.
One of the best tools to get for the Mac is Quicksilver. It’s an application that you can call up with a combo key and will allow you to do a wide variety of functions from the keyboard so that you don’t have to fiddle with a mouse. The biggest thing I used it for is launching applications. Of course I can only play with the smoothly goodness of a Mac when I can steal time on one of the MacBooks, MacBook Pros, or iMacs (yeah.. there are 6 macs in the house as opposed to the 3 PCs.) At this point I can only attempt to console myself with mac-like features and applications.
During one of my daily runs through the blogs I read, I encountered a link to a review by Scott Hanselman on Colibri. Scott is on a quest to replace his Start-Run functionality. Based on his review, I decided to give Colibri a try to see if could satisfy my need for a Quicksliver application on the PC.
So far, I’ve loaded up the application and the very first thing I did was to change the default hot-key of CRTL-Space to Alt-Space. Thus the keystroke combination has similar placement as that of QS on the Mac for me (I set that up to be the CMD-Space on the Macs.)
For launching applications, this tool is great! With just a few keystrokes I can find and launch any application on my machine. Unfortunately, there isn’t much more to the product that I can see. The Colibri website says that it is integrated with a dozen third-party programs like iTunes (ick), WinAmp (Yeah!), Firefox (woohoo). Whenever I try to control WinAmp, the product just freezes and I have to escape out of the function. The tool isn’t very well integrated as of yet it appears.
One other feature that I did like and it was working was the Google Search capabilities. By activating Colibri, then typing Goog, then hitting tab, you get the ability to type in a search term. When you hit enter, Colibr will launch your browser into Google with the search term. Thus saving you a few steps
.
I haven’t completely come to a conclusion yet on the tool, so I’m not completely won over yet. I’ll play with the product a bit more before I make a decision on it. If all I want is just to launch applications, I may just try out some of the other tools that Scott mentions in his blog — like the popular Launchy.
JT
Tags: Utilities, Colibri, QuickSilver