OK, here’s the story so far: From the start when I switched to the Mac in 2006 I was amazed by Quicksilver and its capabilities. This program was magically finding the application you wanted, could create short chains of events, e.g. find a photo first and then send it via mail. All this was available right from the keyboard and for the experts these shortcut-like procedures were executed in split seconds compared to finding the mouse on screen, dragging from a to b etc, etc…
Since that time a lot happened: quicksilver is no longer under development and similar programs came up, being able to do things in a quite similar way as QS did, albeit everyone of those has its different advantages/disadvantages. Type “launcher” into the search bar of MacUpdate and you’ll get a variety of spin-offs that are more or less powerful. In this blog I’ll concentrate on comparing LaunchBar to its two main opponents: Quicksilver and Butler.
First let me state what is the most important thing in these programs for me: speed. A launcher that needs to load is like a finder that is not able to instantly open: annoying. I am still using my sturdy G4 12″ PB with Leopard installed and am the happiest man alive in most of the cases, since this machine never ever since has let me down. But time passes by and while the speed of my setup still is convenient for me I more and more tend to look at the Core2Duos with their supreme power over the old G4/G5 processors. But by this I also have a more sensitive testing setup: apps that would shoot in your face on a top notch brand new thing show what they are really worth with my old donkey.
Using Quicksilver got more and more difficult for me due to the fact that it sometimes was clogging up the whole RAM with some buggy process that is only to be ended through program termination. I am enough of an amateur that my sophisticated research ends with the activity monitor screen, eventually killing the resource hog by hand. Having this several times a day in a row is rather not what I call convenient user experience. But that of course is my personal experience, while I checked for feedback in other forums and pretty much found the same result.
Butler on this side is a sure bet. It is fast, I would go as far as saying it is the most customizable of the three (in spite of plugin heaven with QS), it is very very light and unobtrusive – but there are two reasons I finally disliked the handling: the learning curve is ENORMOUS for setting up the shortcuts, and the app launcher is limited to a certain directory – if your app’s not in there, it wont be found…
So, why is LaunchBar superior to the latter two? For me the key features were:
- besides QS it is the easiest to configure and learn. At first it is just install and use as QS minus the quirks and bugs, while You can delve deep into the sophisticated prefs to tailor your very own setup.
- it does the faster searches than QS, while covering a broader area than butler (the whole hard drive, by default, but heavily customizable from the prefs)
- execution of system preferences and switching of network settings (unique!!!). example: I want change net prefs from my “home” setting to my “work” setting. After opening, I type “wo” and already am presented with “work- network preference” thanks to the adaptive search that learns Your most preferred apps. Now I don’t even have to press enter to execute – a feature called instant open – knowing that after two key presses the action of desire will be marked I simply hold down the last key (in this case, “o”) and the process automatically launches.
- say you want to open a document. What I very regularly do is remembering the app I was using to edit the text but not the exact title of the document. So you open the app and look at the recents, right? Now this turned amazingly simple: just envoke LaunchBar, search the app, hit the space bar and tadaaa, the last used documents are there, not having started a single app yet!
- One last focus would be searching engines: invoking LaunchBar, typing “Goo” for the built-in search window and you can use this as a normal Internet-based search field, opening the Google or Wikipedia article you were looking for in the standard browser of Your choice! I bet Your desktop never felt so intuitive as with this neat little friend…
I hope I illustrated to you some really neat features that other all-purpose launcher are lacking. But this does not mean that some of the points mentioned are not present in the other two apps, just trying to point out that with Launchbar the solution of the task at hand is very well-thought of and elegant. Please feel free to comment on this, I’ll be around discussing things either in the forums or below the post.
Links for more info on LaunchBar, Quicksilver and Butler are below:
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