Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Quicksilver Goes Open Source

<< < (2/3) > >>

Darwin:
I've installed the dictionary, spotlight, text and other plugins... I'm on my Vista machine, so can't remember! I'll fire up the iBook and get back to you. I *know* that I have too many plugins installed (same problem with FARR under XP), and need to pare them down. One thing I have done, as I only have 576MB of RAM, is run without any Dashboard widgets opened. I miss iStats Pro and the weather widget, though. As I haven't really noticed much of a performance boost, I think I'll leave iStats Pro running.

I'm also running Office 2008, despite dire warnings on various boards not to with my specs. It loads faster than NeoOffice 2.25 and there's no lag when I am typing text into Word (as there is on NeoOffice). Note that PaintShop Pro X and X1 both opened a good deal more slowly under XP with a gig of RAM, so I can live with it! Especially given that the main motivation in getting the computer updated was to play with Quicksilver! Sorted...

Spotlight IS impressive. I was completely unaware of it indexing in the background and it finds text within pdfs, word documents, excel files, etc. If it's possible to do so (?), I'll install WDS 4 under Win2k and report back - I can do this in a virtual machine AND an 8 year old notebook.

All this experriment is accomplishing, at the end of the day, is making me want a new(-er) MacBook! Doh  :o

Darwin:
OK... In Quicksilver I have:

Apple Address Book
Apple Mail (really impressed by this, BTW! I love how it auto-creates Virtual folders based on the e-mail address)
Dictionary
iTunes
Keychain
Safari
Shelf (not sure why I loaded this one...)
Spotlight (I'll probably lose this one - I find it simpler to use Spotlight directly)
Terminal
Text Manipulation
Windows

As I noted above, I should probably ditch the bulk of these in the interest of resources... but it all seems to work without hiccoughing!

With Safari, QuickSilver (I'm typing in it now), and Synergy running, and with iStats Pro running in Dashboard, I have 93% of my 500Mhz CPU idle and 175MB of RAM reported as free. Nice and smooth. Haven't played with Office too much, yet, but will. I copied my entire PhD folder over, so have LOTS of Office documents to play with. I suspect that I'm not going to switch to using this as a work machine, though, as I can't imagine having several Word documents and Excel spreadsheets open simultaneously.

Darwin:
 :-* Spotlight

Armando:
Yup. Spotlight works very well... And so does Quick Silver.

X1 and the like are nice... But don't have that lightness, quickness and ease of use. :(

I'd actually use farr more to do quick searches if it had an index and if I could... well... sort results using the columns headers in the results area.

nontroppo:
Wow, I didn't expect Office to work so well on a G3. It works fine on a G4 iBook, but Pages/Numbers is even better.

My plugins:

address book
calculator
cl1p.net - online clipboard makes it easy to share across machines
clipboard & shelf
dictionary
File tagging
iCal
image manipulation
iTunes
process manipulation
Spotlight
Terminal control
Web search

I used to have more, but as I'm alpha testing the latest alpha builds, I don't want to have too many plugins around.

Shelf is useful, but it is better as a one-two with clipboard module. The shelf is a place you can stack items you may want to use later: select a few items and add them to the stack, write notes for what to do with them. Then come back to them the next day. Clipboard stores the last X items from the clipboard for immediate access into any app, but won't survive a reboot as the shelf does.

I also disable dashboard on my Macbook as I don't really use it (I use Opera widgets instead). But I can heartily recommend iStat Menus as a replacement for iStat Pro (uses the menubar, nicely customisable). The only thing is that it can make startup slower by 10-20 seconds.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page