After years--Yes Virginia, years--of hearing Kaizar proselytize about this particular free application for macs, I finally downloaded it and gave it a whirl. Called "Quicksilver," the best way I can describe it is that it's an automated workflow program that offers a shortcut in the UI experience on OS X.
I've only scratched the surface of what it can do--there's a lot of customization that's available--but in particular one feature I was able to activate and immediately use sold me on this program. I'm working on a Word document and I have a few other programs running, such as iChat, Camino (my web browser), TextEdit (a light word processing program that I heart for some reason), and lastly iTunes. And just as I'm getting into my zone as I type, an annoying song playing on my iTunes takes me out of my groove. Typically, I'd stop typing and have a variety of choices to rectify this music situation:
- Use pointer to manually select the iTunes program in my dock and click on next song.
- Tap apple+tab and cycle through all my open programs until the iTunes one is selected.
- Tap the F8 button to activate Expose and then manually select iTunes.
Regardless of which above option I go with, they all force me to stop my typing and in some manual manner "get to" iTunes thus interrupting my previous flow.
With Quicksilver, without switching out of my Word document or any other program I'm in, I can click a designated keyboard combo I created (apple+control+"right arrow") which would automatically instruct iTunes to skip to the next song. As a result, in the middle of a sentence I'm typing, I can quickly and efficiently skip a song on iTunes (and conversely go back a song) as quickly as it takes me to type any other letter. The first time I used this I had a Eureka moment and "got" what the obsession with this program is about.
Anyhoo.
This is just one tiny small example of what you can do with this fantastic program (moreover it doesn't appear to be a memory hog). Go download it here.