Installing Quicksilver
Last week I decided I would install Quicksilver and give it a try.
Well, as it turns out my little quip about installing Quicksilver was prescient, because I ran into a bit of a hitch while trying to unzip and mount the image file for Quicksilver.
My troubles began after I downloaded the file from the website. In my downloads folder a file called “QS.3815.dmg.bz2″ was created. “dmg.bz2″? When I double click on that it creates another file, and another file, and so on… in an endless loop. What was going on?
A quick trip to Google unearthed a discussion thread detailing the problem and the workaround.
As it turns out, there’s a problem with .zip files encoded with the bz2 algorithm when downloaded with Safari. When you use Safari to download such a file, it adds the “.bz2″ extension to the end, causing endless trouble. The solution is simple, just rename the file with .dmg, removing the .bz2 at the end. Then it became a regular disk image file and mounted no problem.
I wonder how many other potential users ran into this snag? If you didn’t know what to do, you would think that the downloaded file was corrupted, and probably give up. Hopefully BlackTree Software can resolve this issue, maybe by zipping their file with a different algorithm, so that this issue can be avoided.
Initial impressions
– When you first launch the program, you are greeted with a list of plug in modules that you can choose to install. I selected all of them except the Terminal Module.
You can also do this later, so don’t despair if you don’t know what to choose right away. There are many more modules that you can add, for each of your applications.
- While installing the modules initially, the program seemed to hang, so I canceled and installed the modules after, one at a time. They installed without a hitch.
- Quicksilver uses an amusing rotating cube transition between each of its dialog boxes. It’s neither here nor there, I just thought I’d mention it.
- So far, I have used it a few times to launch a program, but I usually forget to use it at all, since it runs in the background and is invisible otherwise. I will have to teach myself to remember to use it. I haven’t really discovered the other more complex and powerful uses for it yet. I’m sure an epiphany will come soon.
Well, that’s it for now. I haven’t read the manual or any instructions yet, so right now I’m a complete newbie.
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