On Typing Versus Pointing
In “Typing Trumps Pointing,” Jeff Atwood highlights his favorite feature of the redesigned Start menu in Windows Vista: “Vista's Start Menu lets you type what you want instead of pointing at it.” This is an improvement? I mean, you wouldn’t think that typing would ever replace pointing. After all, didn't we leave that whole typing thing behind with DOS? But no, Jeff is totally right. It’s better. Of course, I’ll have to take Jeff’s word on how well this feature works in Vista, because I haven’t used it yet. I do my typing with a little gizmo called Quicksilver on the Mac, which is what first converted me. Sure, Tiger offers Spotlight, which you can use to launch applications or open folders, but it’s s-l-o-w and doesn’t feature the uncanny clairvoyance of Quicksilver. It’s spooky how well it reads my mind.
The killer feature of Quicksilver is its ability to learn from your choices. Eventually you can open commonly-used apps and folders with just two keystrokes. I wonder if the Vista Start menu is trainable.
Not long after Jeff’s post came news of a comprehensive guide to Quicksilver written by Howard Melman. It is excellent and showed me a metric ton of new ways to use Quicksilver. (via Lifehacker)