Sapiens
Like me you may have tried out various application (and/or file) launchers now and then and possibly none have grabbed you enough to make them a regular part of your Mac life, what with their sometime idiosyncratic design philosophy and all.
If have somehow missed out on the whole launcher family of apps; if you, as many people do, travel from your hard drive icon, to applications, to scroll down, to double click, to open application - then you are probably wondering what on earth is the point of another application just to do that. Surely for such a simple task, adding intermediate steps must make it all much more complicated? Well, possibly to start with, but not after a little practice, and there is a sweet smooth swiftness to knowing your machine well enough to be able to launch any application in a second or two with a couple of key strokes. It’s a control thing. It’s a delight thing.
The mother of all launchers, the UberLauncher, is Quicksilver. Quicksilver quite rightly gets a lot of press. It was amazing the last time I tried it and I’m just about to give it another go after rediscovering it via Quicksilver: The Guide.
Searching and launching applications is however the very tip of Quicksilver’s considerable, iceberg like abilities and for me this depth and ability was, and possibly will be again, just too much. Quicksilver is a whole world and needs time and effort to explore and appreciate. So many worlds, so little time.
My own road to regularly using an application launcher has been patchy and inconsistent. Or, I would argue, I’m picky and like to test choices out thoroughly before settling on just one. I won’t list out the choices, but, for now at least, I have settled on one: Sapiens.
Sapiens has only the basic application launcher functionality of the heavyweights in its field but has a visual simplicity which defies it’s underlying basic intelligence. Sapiens sometime idiosyncratic design philosophy is a radial one - a radial look and a supposedly radial launch facility via circular mouse gesturing. More about that later.
The radial look is very nice. Sapiens can mirror your desktop through the interface, or not, and lays out your 13 most commonly used applications in sensible groups. If an application is already open then, of course, it doesn’t show up in the Sapiens interface, the next most regularly used application takes it’s place. The search is adaptive via the ‘Brain’ and Sapiens will learn which applications are your favourites; favourites get a more prominent placement; ah, twas ever thus.
The search is also user adaptable via a right click where you can either increase or decrease an application’s importance or even tell Sapiens to forget about it completely. There is a simple but complete Tools menu which does everything you may need behind the scenes and five different gui layouts to choose from.
Enter will launch a centrally placed application from Sapiens, so that in theory one circular mouse gesture and one click will launch your most used application. Now it may work for you but I found this circular mouse gesture just isn’t available in my muscle memory so I have opted to open Sapiens via a double shift-click, an option available from the Tools menu; no problemo then, three clicks not two, not too shabby.
If the application you want isn’t visible when Sapiens opens, if it isn’t one of the applications you use very often, then just start typing its name with the Sapiens interface open and Sapiens will search for it, exactly like Spotlight. Once you see the icon pop up in Sapiens you’re off.
Prior to Sapiens I was used to using Spotlight via Cmd Spacebar to search for everything, but I love the focus of Sapiens. It launches applications - that’s it.
And this may be why my re-entry into the world of Quicksilver will fail once more.
So many worlds, so little time.
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#1 Adam says:If you are only using Sapiens to open applications, you do know that Spotlight has been updated to stick applications at the top of its results?
I use QS for uploading to flicker, (now mostly replaced by Skitch), and killing processes, (although under Leopard things seem to be running smother- mostly because I have decided to stop using anything that requires Application Enhancers). If I wrote a few applescripts to restart and sleep, (my other QS favourites), then I could actually ditch Quicksilver altogether.
#2 Matt Radel says:That is cool! I love the drag and drop. Hopefully it’s restricted to the Finder - it would drive me nuts if it could be launched when attempting to draw a circle in Flash or Fireworks.
#3 Tom says:Intrigued by this feature since I hadn’t got a clue at the end of it what you were actually writing about - so I showed it to two colleagues who are highly experienced Mac professionals using Mac and OS as an essential part of their work - they were baffled - doesn’t Dock do the same thing?
We intrigued to know what exactly we are all missing?
#4 Howard Melman says:FYI, the Constellation plugin adds radial menus to Quicksilver.
My advice for using QS is to start slow and only install what you use. If you wish to add more, go ahead, but all the extra stuff needn’t get in the way if don’t use it. I organized the user’s manual so you could turn to a specific section and learn just that piece, so you can learn only what you want at your own pace.
#5 John says:I find Spotlight (which runs much faster now in Leopard) does the job very nicely. I’ve actually stopped using Quicksilver in favour of Spotlight, as I only used it for app launching.
#6 Jorge Quinteros says:I’ve never really been a fan of quick launchers when it came to bringing up applications that I frequently used. I’ve always resorted to the trusty convention dock for that, until now. Sapien is really cool! I’ve purchased it, so thanks for the review and heads up on it.
#7 J.Y. says:Sapiens is a nice option, I like that it can be invoked w/o keyboard commands. I’ve been a fan of the simple app Todos, (http://www.dbachrach.com/opensoft/index.php?page=Todos) - however they do not explicitly support Leopard yet.
#8 SM says:I use Butler, and I’m surprised that it gets little mention when the subject of app launchers comes up. Like Quicksilver you can use as little or as much as of the functionality that you need - and it’s free.
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