1 post tagged “osx”
I'm not sure where along the line I made the decision, but I never really had the desire to master working on a PC. I functioned quite well when I wanted to. I could do moderate repairs and troubleshooting when needed, but I fell back to the general level of interest I had with most subjects: Jack of all trades, master of none.
My wife is the MS Office queen, pivot tables and embedded brick-a-brack that made for compelling and useful end products. Her Christmas wish lists come with such detail and specificity, I nearly expect to find a checkout button at the bottom. My brother and father are consummate geeks, developers who are as at home on the command line as they are digging through the register settings like a bag full of Legos. I never had that urge to dig in though - whether it was a fear of bricking the machine by futzing around in directories someone obviously maked as "hidden" for a reason, or just no real need or desire to do advanced functionality in any of the programs I use. I contented myself to learning a few fun little keyboard shortcuts and the daring tweeking of a preference pannel or two.
With my recent switch to OSX however, I feel like I've got a bit of a reset button. I can start from scratch, learning a new OS at an age where I can understand some of the logic better, and still have the 'new toy' passion to actually put in the effort. Of course it's a bit overwhelming; there is a lot to learn but I think I've at least ramped up to an average user level and now can start learning some of the tricks.
Automator and Applescripts are two tools I'm struggling to understand - not because they aren't easy or intuitive, but because it's hard to overcome the years of simply saying, "you can't do that" and come up with ideas for things to actually try. I suspect another issue is that there simply aren't that many things I can think of that I do so repetitivly that I'd need an automator action, or script to accomplish.
For the past few weeks though, I've been noticing a few of the productivity folks talking about this app Quicksilver. Quicksilver is a really nifty looking app that functions like Spotlike on speed. Instead on merely looking up applications or files, with quicksilver you can now run application functions in a real stream of consciousness fashion, piecing together files and commands, creating a complete workflow without ever leaving Quicksilver.
Fear struck again. Looking at some of the demos on sites like The Apple Blog, made it seem like a Quicksilver user would need to learn an insane amount of arcane keyboard shortcuts to run through a process with the speed that the presenter seemed to be running. Imagining the depth of knowledge required, I suddenly began to feel that creeping need to avoid it. I'd bitten off more than I can chew with a dozen other applications already, adding another layer of complication is the last thing I needed.
But yesterday I caught the latest Macbreak with Leo Laporte and Merlin Mann (of 43 Folders)and seeing the keystrokes as well as their results gave some great insight into the application. I immediltly cracked open that .dmg that'd been sitting my my desktop and started playing. I gotta say, it's an incredibly cool app. If you're a Mac user, you owe it to yourself to go check out some of the videos. This is a toy I'm looking forward to mastering.
Update:
There appears to be a simmilar gadget, Launchy for Windows
