Ten year beta ends with release of Quicksilver 1.0

Quicksilver, the open source Mac OS X utility which adds a keyboard-driven graphical shell to the operating system, been released as a version 1.0 after almost ten years of testing.

In Quicksilver, a "hotkey" combination wakes up the utility and the user then continues typing; the application uses indexes of applications, contacts, mail, bookmarks and other resources to match the keystrokes with a requested action. At its simplest, the utility can be used to launch other applications, but through plugins and scripting it can be made to do a lot more for the power user.

Examples of Quicksilver's user interface relaunching an app or finding music

Quicksilver, which inspired many developers to create keyboard-driven shells, started life in 2003 as a freeware utility created by Nicholas Jitkoff. In 2007, after becoming somewhat disenchanted, Jitkoff open sourced the application and by 2010, a group of volunteers called QSApp set out to pull the fragmented development of Quicksilver together into a single tree. Since then they have made steady progress in stabilising Quicksilver and creating new documentation. The developers also kept Quicksilver up-to-date with new OS X releases.

In a follow-up to an interview with the current developers, Jitkoff praised the team for the version 1.0 saying "I’m amazed at what the Quicksilver team has accomplished since they took over the project a few years ago. They’ve created something truly worthy of a 1.0, taking Quicksilver from a flight of fancy to a fast, reliable productivity app".

Quicksilver 1.0.0 for Mac OS X 10.8, 10.7 and 10.6 is available to download. Details of recent changes and a library of plugins are also available. Source code can be found in the project's Github repository and is licensed under the Apache 2 licence.

(djwm)