Vista made me a switcher

Very interesting, the CyberSpeak by Andrew Kantor from USA Today. His article Vista causes an array of problems describes mostly the same I’ve seen with my Vista odyssey. Best hist last sentence: “If someone out there feels like spotting me the cash for a 20-inch, 2.33-GHz iMac and Photoshop, I’d be grateful.”.
Gotta go!

… we can still use tools to build parts of the functionality of Leopard, Mac OSX 10.5 the new Operating System coming this spring.
One cool application found today was VirtueDesktops. It builds the function as in KDE or Gnome on Linux to switch between screens and can help you separate different applications on different screens. This can be interesting if you’re needing a specific positioning of different applications (as for example at ssh shells) and wants to take a look at Entourage, iTunes or whatever and don’t want to relocate the windows again and again.
I’m using it now with own screens for iTunes, Eclipse and Entourage and all the rest. And switching screens is making a cool cube effect

Very cool, eh?

… is QuickSilver. It’s just UNBELIEVABLE.
Just a few hours I spend investigating QuickSilver and it actually saves me a lot of time doing boring tasks with mouse-juggeling and so on. Still being a QS newbie, I can talk about the cool features I already investigated. At first, QS is Plugin aware. There are plugins for all and every program in the Mac-world - so most of them can be used in automation tasks.
If you’ve opened up the website of QS, you might have seen a ql layout and a nice looking page, but maybe not know what the hell QuickSilver will do for you.
At theappleblog you will find some interesting screencasts with the functionality of QS - but here is my short abbrev. about the features I use:

• QuickSilver is a launcher. So you’re pressing a command shortcut and it will open. Per default this is “alt + space”. Then you can type any word-combinations like “itu” and QuickSilver will find any “catalog item” containing this letters. This can be “itunes” as application as well as “My Itunes Directory with a lot of mp3s in there”. Then you can press Tab or “arrow right” to decide a command for the found item. This can be “open” or “browse artists” or “copy to clipboard”. A lot of commands are stackable, so you can do this: “Find a file on the desktop, select it and send it per EMail to Dirk”.
• “Find a directory, open one file in there with a specific application”
• “Select a song in Itunes by searching by artist and play it”
• “open a pdf, print it, afterwords delete the pdf file”

And the best of all, this are so short commands, all of them above are done in less then 3 seconds!!!