Quicksilver has enjoyed something of a renaissance of late - not yet because of a new version, but because of the dedication of a small band of developers, and the creation of QSApp.com as a unified location for all things Quicksilver.

Background

QS has been open source since November 2007. Around that time the original developer, Alcor, began to work for Google, where he started to develop Quick Search Box (QSB). Continuing to work on a rival to his employer’s product clearly wasn’t at the top of his to-do list. Alcor felt that the current version (then ß54) didn’t have a viable future, and although a new branch of QS existed, it was left half finished in a public repository. Development of QS was very quiet for the next 6 months - Alcor seemed to be about to make it obsolete.

At that moment, tiennou stepped in with a viable QS build for Leopard. Various developers continued to do a great job of keeping the wolf from Quicksilver’s door; primarily tiennou, and also: Rob McBroom, Andreberg, Neurolepsy, HenningJ and Patrick Robertson among others. Forum contributors Howard Melman, Jon Stovell, Patrick and Rob helped make Blacktree: Quicksilver an invaluable source of information. The current version of Quicksilver (ß58) was made available in March 2010.

Foreground

Work on QSB continued, other launchers such as Alfred showed their claws, and LaunchBar openly courted Quicksilver users with a quote from Alcor himself. A year is a long time in software development and, despite ß58 being usable in Snow Leopard, people compared Quicksilver unfavourably with its more polished rivals. With Lion on the horizon, they started to declare QS dead and buried. Worse was to come; Quicksilver’s former champion Merlin Mann held its memorial service, and the Mac App Store announced the arrival of Alfred. Twitter carried many joint obituary and birth notices.

Development never stopped, and the PR fightback kicked in. The nascent QSApp.com pulled in all the various QS strands from around the web into one central location, and Philip Dooher (hello) took on twitter. Also around this time coding work accelerated (Proxy Objects were seen in the wild), and reports came in of QS working in Lion. Recently tiennou has talked of a new version of Quicksilver containing an ‘new update system’ and perhaps Proxy Object fixes. He has even mentioned a tentative release time-frame of ‘in roughly a month or so’. It’s news many people have been waiting for.

Newground

Now that people are actively developing and supporting Quicksilver, and it’s known to work in Lion, there’s every reason to Act without Doing.

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