

Quicksilver Roars (new features, Lion support) - zdw
http://lovequicksilver.com/post/11814325098/quicksilver-roars

======
drats
I'd presume that Apple will integrate a Siri-like interface to the next OSX,
in say the 2012/2013 region, so that you can do basic things like say
"subscribe to the NPR politics podcast" and "play the NPR politics podcast".
This could also have a keyboard interface like Quicksilver and perhaps even
hooks for an Applescript user community (but Apple doesn't really do
community). Ubuntu on the other hand has the very good Gnome-Do and the
impressive Synapse[1]. However, Ubuntu doesn't have a speech recognition
engine to even begin to match Siri so you'd be stuck with whatever Google
evolves on top of voice in HTML5/Chrome. That would be limited to website
interactions and perhaps Google apps (i.e. when in an email, only in Gmail,
about a conference perhaps you could say "add this to my calendar", only to
Google calendar).

One feasible path of exploration would be to use CMU Sphinx[2] connected to
local NLP and Unity (or some underlying infrastructure that KDE and Gnome can
share). But even if Shuttleworth hired a couple of developers now and had them
getting some traction in 2012, you'd be looking at a usable beta for Ubuntu
13.04. At that point We'd be looking at the iPhone 6+ and one or two
iterations of Android on top of ICS.

Microsoft has the base technology lying around in terms of speech recognition
and Bing/MS Research/Kinect team and could probably come out with an answer on
the next iteration of Windows (desktop and mobile). So you will have a first
class solution on all Apple products, and a solid implementation on Windows as
well as Android and perhaps Chrome. Nevertheless this forces Canonical's hand
and they more or less have to move on this or they will be left behind.

My suggestion would be to take the following strategy (if Shuttleworth is
reading): hire two or three developers or so for integrating Sphinx as a core
service, and hire two or three developers to leverage NLTK on top of python
(already the Ubuntu system language) and connecting it to Synapse. That's just
four to six developers and two apt-gets being default rather than optional.
Further, to save money, I'd contact a number of universities in the UK
(Canonical is in London, logistics and legal are thereby simplified) to
sponsor a few Masters and PhDs on basic research in the area with the proviso
that their research goes open source and is patent free. In this way, a
developer salary for one year turns into three years of research from a PhD.
As I understand it they already have some people working on Kinect-like
projects, but it needs far more resources otherwise it's just left to Google,
who more or less don't care about the Linux desktop and tie the Android stuff
to the cloud. Otherwise Ubuntu with a few tweaks is going to get slaughtered
(if there is even one percent of market share to actually slaughter) by a
cohort of competitors looking like you'd imagine OSX"11"/iPhone 6 and Kinect
2/Xbox 4 to be. The only other option would be to rely on the Google API from
a native app, which would mean you could probably deliver something in Ubuntu
12.10, but you'd be totally beholden to Google then: and that's only if they
wanted to let you use their servers with no ads going the other way.

[1][http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/11/synapse-gnome-do-
launcher...](http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/11/synapse-gnome-do-launcher-app-
review-ubuntu/) [2]<http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/>

------
gms
I ditched Quicksilver when Spotlight became fast enough.

~~~
zdw
I tried this for a while, but found Spotlight's keyboard nav and available
functions to be lacking. I couldn't, for example, choose to "reveal" a
document from the keyboard rather than opening it, if I just wanted to copy
said document.

Also, Quicksilver only indexes the things you tell it to, whereas Spotlight by
default indexes the entire system. For certain searches this leads to a lot of
chaff in the search results.

~~~
dchest
Cmd+Return.

~~~
zdw
Ah... that does work! Thanks.

It also led me to my other issue with Spotlight - it can and will update it's
list of found items, even changing which item is selected.

I've experienced this race condition quite frequently, and it's very annoying
to have the right thing selected, then Spotlight swaps it out from under you
and you've just opened something else.

QS doesn't have this problem, as it only changes the search results after
receiving user input.

------
mchanson
Here is open source software with a great UI and because of being open source
had a resurgence. What a great story and a great piece of software.

~~~
hmottestad
I agree, open source saved QS :D

------
alwillis
BTW, a great source of information about Quicksilver is Merlin Mann's 43
Folders blog: <http://www.43folders.com/topics/quicksilver>.

------
zmanji
How does Quicksilver compare to Alfredapp or other launchers? I've stayed away
from it because of tales of crashes and poor performance.

~~~
alwillis
Quicksilver is pretty much what every other launcher on the Mac has been based
on, but for free. Alfred is a nice product and basic launching functionality
is free, but most of the advanced features that are free in Quicksilver cost
£12 (about $19) to add.

I've been running the previous version of Quicksilver on Snow Leopard and
Lion, and it's been very solid; the new version should be even better.

~~~
jeremyswank
agreed; i've been runing quicksilver non-stop since before the developer
passed the project on to others. for a time, it was sluggish and caused some
problems. but i have no complaints to speak of about the last couple
iterations.

i switched to quicksilver from launchbar, in spite of the fact that i'd paid
good money for launchbar. it's not so much that something was wrong with
launchbar; it's only that quicksilver was noticeably better in many respects
(flexibility, esthetics, flow), imho.

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alinajaf
For those who tend towards using linux, I've found gnome-do to be a fantastic
alternative.

------
nchuhoai
someone got like a good intro to quicksilver for hackers? especially for
running terminal related stuff

