Remember Quicksilver? The lightweight Mac utility used to be the go-to app launcher on the desktop, but that was years ago. A lack of updates combined with the rise of more feature-rich alternatives like Alfred turned the attention away from Quicksilver long ago.
Now the developers behind the app are breathing new life into Quicksilver with a major update. Quicksilver 1.0 has been released, which marks the end of the 10-year beta period the app has been in since 2003.
Quicksilver allows you to easily launch apps and special plugins with programmable keyboard shortcuts. “We’ve worked to simplify Quicksilver and add great documentation (a new manual is coming out!), meaning Quicksilver can be picked up by anyone much more easily than before,” said Patrick Robertson, one of the app’s developers.
Apps like this require a third-party development community to really thrive. For instance, a pro of Alfred is all of the great workflows developers have come up with to enhance the experience.
With this 1.0 update, Quicksilver is trying to get developers back on its side. “We need to make it as easy as possible for developers and users to create plugins and AppleScript extensions for Quicksilver,” said Robertson. “The true power of Quicksilver comes from our plugin developers, so I’ll be happy once we have a strong dev community back on our side creating great plugins, and over the coming months I’m going to be working hard to try and achieve this – we can always make things simpler for new developers!”
Some of the key features in this update include preliminary support for Retina displays, full Mountain Lion support, and more documentation. There’s also all kinds of additions and bug fixes under the hood. This will be the last release to support OS X 10.6.
You can download Quicksilver for free on the app’s website.
Source: LoveQuicksilverBlog
Via: Ars Technica
