The problem comes when the abbreviation you type can reasonably match multiple applications, documents, bookmarks, or email addresses, at which point you must scroll through the list of choices LaunchBar displays and pick the correct one. It’s pretty good – if I type IPNM, it guesses correctly at IPNetMonitor X. Okay, it just seems that way – it’s actually an intelligent adaptive algorithm, which means that LaunchBar makes an educated guess. You’re probably wondering how LaunchBar knows that if you type BB that you want it to launch BBEdit. It can even "launch" email addresses that is, it can create a new email message to the selected address using your default email program. It can open bookmarks from any Web browser in your default Web browser or, in the latest version of LaunchBar, in a specific Web browser. It can open specific preference panes in System Preferences, or specific tools in Karelia’s Watson. It can open folders in the Finder, and you can even navigate through folders with the arrow keys right in LaunchBar. It can open documents in their associated applications. LaunchBar also doesn’t stop at launching applications. And finally, it doesn’t care if you last launched an application yesterday or a year ago – the last access time has almost no meaning to LaunchBar. Since it scans automatically, you don’t have to set it up explicitly, as you do with the Dock and many other launcher utilities (although you can control where it looks when scanning for new items to make available for launching – more on that in a bit). Because LaunchBar automatically scans your hard disk for applications when it launches, it always knows exactly which ones you have installed, and it lets you launch any of them without the least bit of hunting through folders in the Finder. Let’s compare LaunchBar’s approach with the other methods of launching applications. The entire process takes only a second, no matter what application you may be launching. Once you’ve activated LaunchBar, you type a few characters from the name of the application you want to launch, verify briefly in LaunchBar’s unobtrusive window that it has associated your typing with the correct application, and press Return. You can pick from five pre-defined possibilities I use Command-Space. Type to Launch - Although there are multiple ways to activate LaunchBar, such as clicking its menu bar icon, Dock icon, or window, the way most people use it is by pressing a system-wide keyboard shortcut. Worse, you never know if a seldom-used application will be in that list until you look. The Recent Items menu implements an undeniably good idea – speeding access to those items you happen to have used in the recent past – but as soon as you want to launch an application that’s not in the Recent Applications list, you’re back to hunting through the Finder. Clicking icons in the Dock works fine for a small number of frequently used applications, but only for a small number, and you must set them up in advance. But all of these approaches – and most other launcher utilities – fall down in one way or another.ĭouble-clicking an application is easy and obvious, but it requires that you navigate to that application in the Finder, which in turn requires that you know where the application is located. Apple provides plenty of ways of launching applications in Mac OS X, such as double-clicking application or document icons in the Finder, clicking icons in the Dock, or choosing an item from the Recent Items menu. Thanks to the Mac OS X utility LaunchBar, written by Norbert Heger of Objective Development, I now know what they were talking about. Many people who used it heavily claimed that its keyboard controls had become embedded in their fingertips, but I never quite understood what they meant. Way back in the dawn of computing, there was a word processor called WordStar.
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