Tiger: first impressions: Spotlight vs. Quicksilver

You've probably already heard me raving about Quicksilver. With the release of Tiger, its continued existence has come into question, since you can search for and launch applications from Spotlight, as well. Does this mean that Quicksilver is totally obsolete and I'm not going to use it anymore? Absolutely not. Although the application launching capability of Spotlight is nice, it's primarily a search tool; it's not as flexible as Quicksilver:

First, Quicksilver is primarily an application launcher; thus, it's automatically configured to launch the application you search for. Basically you type the name of the application you want to launch and hit return, and you're done. In Spotlight, although Applications come up first on the list of search results, you always have to do some cursoring down the list to find the item you want and launch it. For efficiency Quicksilver is the way to go.

Second, Quicksilver goes one step beyond Spotlight; it can perform more tasks once you find something. You can also find applications and folders quickly, but once you do, Quicksilver has an adaptive list of tasks; for example, you can get info on a folder, or search its contents. For an application, you can choose to open a file in the one you searched for, or move it to another folder, or a whole host of other things. Spotlight, in comparison, only finds things and opens them.

In conclusion, although Spotlight has some nice capabilities, it's meant to be a search tool, and that's what I'll use it for. I'm keeping Quicksilver around for my application-launching needs.