Danny Gorog16 January 2009, 4:45 PM
Quicksilver creator Nicholas Jitkoff, has joined Google. His first product, Google Quick Search Box is in early beta, but shows great promise.
If you've been toying with the idea of using Quicksilver but don't quite understand what it does, take a look at the latest beta product from Google.
Called "Google Quick Search Box", it's an open-source application launcher developed by a team at Google including Nicholas Jitkoff, creator of Quicksilver.
Where Quicksilver is enormously powerful but somewhat complicated to learn, the Google Quick Search Box is enormously simple to use.
While it's disguised as an application launcher, it can also do more that launch applications, like launch a Google query, find contacts and even search through your online Google Docs files.
GQSB uses a plug-in architecture (similar to Quicksilver) to search for different types of files. Looking through the list of plugins included with the application and you'll find some interesting ones, like Picasaweb, Recent Documents, Chat buddies, Camino bookmarks, Weather, iTunes and Terminal.
On the Google Code page, which hosts the project, the authors note that the project is 'very experimental' and 'through it you will be able to see many of the areas we are exploring: contextual search, actions, and extensibility. It is by no means feature-complete, but is a very good indication of things to come.'
As it's an open source project, Google is looking for developer support and mentions that 'over the coming months we'll be posting a few articles about the architecture and interaction we are exploring.'
I've been using GQSB for a couple of days now and like it.
I'm in the habit of using 'cmd+space' to open the spotlight windows to launch apps, so retraining to use GQSB has taken some time, but it's a much more flexible solution than Spotlight. It also seems as quick, if not quicker than querying spotlight. I like that you can disable the dock and menu bar icons, so it truly feels like it's running in the background.
GQSB has crashed on me a couple of times, but overall it's not bad for what's really an alpha release.
Like all good Google products, it's free, so check it out.