Quicksilver ?51 Available

Quciksilver, the popular, perpetually in googlebeta "unified, extensible interface" for OS X has been updated to β51. If you haven't seen the little update screen yet, you will soon. The update is mostly bugfixes for the core plugins; It looks like all of them got overhauled. More interesting is the release note that build 3800, a.k.a. β51, is "Final Tweaks," capital F, capital T. Does that mean the next version will be a release? I hope so. The developers have put a lot of work--3800 builds and counting--into this little gem and, while I've enjoyed the free downloads, they deserve to make a little money off it.

For those of you who aren't sure what a unified, extensible interface is, it's difficult to explain. In it's most basic form, it provides keyboard shortcuts for application launching. You hit CTRL-Space at any time, type the first few letters of an application name, and it launches. With the core plug-ins, it can be tweaked to use to also find files through spotlight, mail, Address Book contacts, and even iPhoto photos. That's pretty powerful. The really nifty part, though, is the "extensible" bit. Authors can write plugins for virtually anything, allowing you to tie almost anything, from system events to Automator actions to keystrokes and other triggers to control everything from your destop picture to your GMail. Think of it as Mission Control for your Mac.

Tags: application launcher, ApplicationLauncher, freeware, Quicksilver