The second screencast is far more helpful (though on an older release, it seems).

I barely use quicksilver due to the lack of documentation on how this could be useful.

to stop the .txt extenstion from being added to the end of the .mp4 file you need to setup the MIME types correctly on your server. You can do this by editing or creating the .htaccess file in the root directory of your HTML folder on the server. Check out http://www.webhelpinghand.com/htaccess_mime.htm for a tutorial. If you don’t have access to the HTML folder(which would be odd) then you will have to contact your hosting company to have them change it.

For all of you who can’t find the “Get Current Selection”-Action:

I just wanted to say that the “Get Current Selection”-Function is not important for that task you show in the video. That action comes from the “Service Menu Module” and it makes accessible the function that you find when you click on [Application Name] -> Services -> Quicksilver -> Get Current Selection in the menu bar. For your example, only the “Current Selection”-Proxy is actually needed.

Well, at least I use QS already.

We’re moving closer. I had all of those plug-ins installed except Gmail — I don’t use Gmail. But I installed it anyway.

I still can’t get the trigger setup to work. When I checked the Plug-ins, however, I noticed that HotKey Triggers is installed and loaded, but its checkbox is grey, not black. It is checked, however. Is this a problem? Or is it greyed because it’s part of the Services Menu Module?

Since I now understand how to make QS mail a file directly to a recipient, the only thing I’m missing is the triggering bit. It seems very buggy on my setup; QS crashes if I do too much manipulation of a trigger.

Thanks for the help.

Apple Address Book Module
Apple Mail Module
Gmail Module
Hotkey Triggers
Keychain Module

ok, i THINK that may be it. Geez, sorry for the mess I’ve created here. We’ll try again soon, I PROMISE!

Just to clarify: I meant that I would set aside a set time per day to get QS up and running properly (any new user can tell you that it does not work “out of the box”) and learn how to use it. During the rest of the day, I keep QS running and would use whatever skills I have, but if it wasn’t working as I expected it to, I wouldn’t try to solve it until the next day. I agree that you have to get used to working with it all the time.

In response to your reply: I can type proxy in the first pane of the Triger set up, and right arrow to find the Get Current Selection. Yay!

But that still leaves my second problem: how do I get the email action in the second pane? Typing “mail” or “email” doesn’t bring up any actions that look like reasonable candidates, and a simple right arrow only gives 8 options. Under Actions in the preference pane I’ve got all of the mail actions checked. I’m stuck.

A side note: updated tutorials are sorely needed. I went through all the ones you recommended (and those that they recommended). But the big problem was that none are written for the current version. Thus, most of it doesn’t work, which is very frustrating. Heck, even the screenshots are bizarrely different. So, kudos to you for trying to bring this to the masses.

second, I don’t know that having a set time to spend on QS is the best way to learn - sure it’s great to tinker, but it doesn’t have the same effect as after you’re using it without thinking.
QS is fantastic for making mundane, mouse-heavy tasks simple, quick, and effortless, but you just have to remind yourself to invoke QS, type what I need, done. Just using it as you normally use your computer is the best way to get comfortable. From there, you’ll start to branch out into these more ‘technical’ items and then THEY’LL feel like second nature.

To answer your question (finally, sorry for the diarrhea of the keyboard there):
type ‘proxy’ into the first pane in the Trigger setup
hit your RIGHT arrow to get a drop down of the available proxy objects
select the Get Current Selection action
in the 2nd pane (for this exercice) select the email action

***now, I went back and tried to do this myself, and there seems to be some bug and QS wigs out when I try to examine the Trigger I already setup. odd. But like I said, it IS beta software, so it’s somewhat unknown still.

I’ll start with the basics - on my end as well, so nothing is taken for granted - shortly, and hopefully get everyone on the same page…

Anything else to check?

Also, I’m not getting any Action other than “Copy to Clipboard” when I try to set up a trigger. I tried typing “load” and “email” and “mail” but not of the suggested actions that pop up look like what I want.

I tried leaving the trigger set to “copy to clipboard”, figuring I’d try to invoke the email action when I was actually using Quicksilver. But the trigger command doesn’t seem to do anything. The program crashed twice during all of this, so I’m beginning to lose interest.

If QS must run in developer mode in order to get useful functionality and developer mode is this unstable, then it’s not really a tool but a game. It’s kinda fun monkeying around with all of this, but I shouldn’t be pretending that I’m actually doing work.

I originally planned to allow 30 minutes a day to QS for two weeks — just to see if I really could increase my productivity. Maybe I should be spending my time with Automator instead?

Margaret

You see in the triggers, after setting Current Selection (proxy object), you select “Load in command window” as the action and then save it.

Now when you select a file hit the trigger and it will be loaded and skip to action menu where you type your command.

I can definitely see how all this becomes second nature. Must be hard to describe all this after getting used to it.

Also, my Gmail notifier will allow me to do a compose to, but it won’t automatically attach the file. I’m still missing something I think. I’ll read more of the intro stuff you posted to see if I can catch something.

But the way QS works, is it’ll notmally default to an action that’s best suited to the type of file or item that’s in the first pane. (You can actually set these default actions up in QS prefs, but that’s for a different day)

So no matter what the action is set to in the trigger, as soon as you invoke the trigger, QS will come up, your Finder-selected item will be loaded, and QS will be focused on the 2ndary pane (the action pane) and you can begin typing whatever action you want to take - be it email, copy to clipboard, run, open, move, etc, etc, etc. And QS will react immediately and load the action you choose.

Hope that helped. Hope I understood your question correctly and didn’t just ramble needlessly for 3 paragraphs…

I must have watched the 5 second tutorial 20 times. Someone ought to write a book about Quicksilver, really! It could even be a good way for the developers to get some rightly deserved compensation, sharing some golden nuggets.

Thanks for the series!

I’d say it would be best to start from the beginning too going over the quick basics like Setting up QS, installing plugins, etc before getting into the more advanced stuff. A lot of people don’t know to enable the beta features and development versions and wonder why some options are missing for them.

Dan Dickinson’s are especially helpful for first timers. A video of initial setup would be lengthy, but I may see about splitting it up into smaller bits, as the video idea seems to be the best method as of late.

Let me see what I can come up with…

Also a basic set up of QS for first time users would be really awesome.