1 post tagged “macintosh”

At work, I've helped a few people set up new MacBooks in the last few weeks, and seeing a virgin install of Tiger is a reminder of just how many tiny apps I need to make a Mac feel heimisch . This isn't even counting "real" applications, like Camino or TextMate. This is just the little guys, the interface hacks.

OS X has replicated the great vi/emacs schism with its powerhouse duo of shortcut applications, Quicksilver and LaunchBar (and Butler , the forgotten RC Cola of the app-launching wars). I was a relatively late convert from LaunchBar to Quicksilver, which I suppose is the emacs of the pair in that there's a dazzling amount of crap you can make it do, most of which I am too scatterbrained to remember and almost all of which I am too lazy to set up. (Also, if you follow the tutorials lovingly posted at 43folders , I believe Quicksilver will check your email, massage your iCal, and give you a happy ending.) I use Texpander almost entirely for having a few signatures I can alternate between for email (the main one is triggered by the MediaWiki-inspired "~~~~", which I can remember); I use Gmail Notifier , MenuCalendarClock , and the messaging system Growl . I religiously install CalcService . Until the developer seemingly abandoned it, I use a little note-taking app called Sidenote . I myself wrote an application , Jumpcut , which provides clipboard buffering (kill-ring, to you emacs guys), and I can think of a half-dozen applications which provide similar functionality, some of them quite good.

Do PCs have any of this? I know someone wrote a LaunchBar clone, AppRocket , for Windows, and there's the excellent Shortkeys , but Windows users don't seem to geek out on this the same way Macheads do. (For that matter, despite the existance of Sawmill , Linux users don't seem to, either; 98% of my Linux use is just at a command prompt, though, so my impression could be mistaken.) Is this really just a cultural thing? Are people swayed by the Cult of Jobs simply more willing to spend twenty minutes configuring something that will save them 18 seconds every time they launch Photoshop? And what great PC (or Mac!) UI hacks am I simply not aware of?