December 4, 2006: Launchbar vs. Quicksilver
My take on the launcher/switcher wars. (Spoiler: LaunchBar wins!)
Posted on 2006-12-04 20:02 by Jørn Støylen [permalink]
I’ve been a LaunchBar user for a long time. I don’t even remember how I first came by it, but it hit straight home with me.
Then I saw different alternatives, and tried some out, but none of them fit me and my personality as well as LaunchBar did. Besides, it was logical, and solid as a mountain of diamond. To this day I can’t remember LaunchBar crashing even one single time.
So at a point I paid for LaunchBar. $20 is, frankly, way too little for such a quality and useful application, but also it’s a price that makes me feel I can easily shell out for it.
Enter Quicksilver—a potential killer of all the other launcher/switcher competitors, because it a) does everything the others do, b) it does many more cool and geeky stuff (and I don’t mean that in a bad way!), and c) it’s free.
A couple of years ago the hype around Quicksilver was big enough that I thought I’d check it out. So for a couple of weeks I had it running instead of LaunchBar. I ended up switching back, because:
- I could never quite figure out how to type stuff in the right order so Quicksilver would know what I wanted (i.e. it was counterintuitive to me).
- It kept crashing on me all the time (something like every fifth attempt to do anything, which ended up being every time I wanted to do something, since I needed five attempts to figure out how Quicksilver wanted stuff typed).
So I put it aside, with an honest intention of trying it at a later point in time, when it hopefully would’ve matured a bit.
So a couple of weeks back I tried again, spurred first and foremost by it being mentioned a lot on 43folders, and by that site’s owner Merlin Mann’s appearence on the MacBreak videocasts. But I found it to be:
- just as counterintuitive as before
- less crashy but still too often (at least twice a day)
- slow—which wound up being the biggest nail in the coffin.
Here’s how it goes with LaunchBar: I hit Cmd-Esc, type “saf”, hit Enter, all within a second. LaunchBar probably won’t pop up and show the list as fast as I type, but it will buffer my keystrokes as soon as I hit Cmd-Esc and launch Safari nonetheless.
Here’s how it goes with Quicksilver: I hit Cmd-Esc, type “saf”, hit Enter, all within a second. Quicksilver doesn’t pop up at first, so “saf” is typed into whichever application I was in at the time I hit Cmd-Esc, then Quicksilver pops up and captures the Enter key, thereby doing whatever I did last time I used Quicksilver.
I could probably live with a few crashes a day, even though it would put a damper on productivity. I could probably learn the Quicksilver way of doing things, even though LaunchBar would require a few less keystrokes to do the same thing. I would probably find stuff to do with Quicksilver that I can’t do with Launchbar, but after my second trial period with Quicksilver I find that I primarily need a launcher/switcher and have less use for Quicksilver’s other features on a daily basis.
But I can’t live with a launcher/switcher that doesn’t keep up with my speed. Sorry, Quicksilver, I tried, I really did, but it’s back to Launchbar for me.
Don’t get me wrong: I like the idea of Quicksilver, and really, really wish it would work in practice, but it doesn’t. It fails when it comes to intuitiveness, stability and speed—which, if you ask me, is all and everything that matters for such a piece of software, and which is where LaunchBar shines.
And for those saying “you can’t beat free” about Quicksilver’s price tag: Cheapskates! $20 is practically nothing these days, and for the level of solidity Launchbar offers in comparison to Quicksilver, those $20 will soon be returned in saved time and grievance.
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