I am totally subserviant to Quicksilver now. (see my post from a few days ago) So tonight when I sat down at my [slow, in need of RAM but not worth it] Windows machine, I looked around for Quicksilver-like apps for Windows. What I found, essentially narrowed down to two programs: Launchy and Colibri. While Colibri certainly looks more like Quicksilver at the offset, it also seems much slower than Launchy. Neither one seems to be as far along in sophistication as Quicksilver, but Launchy is definitely the winner. Aside from the speed issue, I also couldn’t figure out how to configure Colibri to read specific directories so programs not in my Start menu would show up when I try to run them. Both apps were able to perform a few other tasks in addition to simply launching apps, though much more limited than QS. They can query weather.com, wiki, google, etc. Similar to the Firefox search bar but that’s not all that interesting to me. There are, however, a few neat functions, being able to launch favorites and being able to use launchy as a simple calculator are cool.
So give em both a try, and if you feel like dropping a note, let me know your thoughts on the two!
2 Comments
As a follow up, definitely give RocketDock a look-see! http://punksoftware.com/rocketdock . VERY similar to OSX dock (general appearance as well as behavior) and much nicer to use than the old quick launch buttons, in my opinion. Windows is getting more fun!
I didn’t even know that Launchy can query Google, Weather.com, and Wikipedia?! What’s the syntax for that? I do much like Launchy, but I haven’t tried this Colibri; will have to give it a shot…Launcy is a pretty sound app., though. I have been pretty impressed with both its feature-richness and its performance in my usage of it thusfar.