In this posting, I want to home in on exactly where productivity lives on the Mac by highlighting four specific applications for you to use.

Before I do that I’d like to explain something that, if you understand it, really helps in being productive on the Mac. The Mac interface is a set of “objects” in the object-oriented sense of the term. Practically what that means - if you’re a geek - is that you can link applications together and automate them at almost any level granularity. Which means:

Almost anything you can do with the mouse or the keyboard in any application can be scripted and run automatically.

Now you may not even know what that means, but bear with me for a moment. It means that if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool geek, you can automate the hell out of the Mac, and because of that, a number of dyed-in-the-wool geeks have done so. And some of them have even done you great favors. They have built applications that allow you to automate quite a lot on the Mac even if you’re bereft of any geek genes.

Four such applications are:

• QuickSilver
• iKey
• Journler
• AppleScript

Right now you need to know why these applications are important, and what they do. I’ll cover Quicksilver in this post and the others in subsequent posts.

QuickSilver: Subject -> Action -> Target

In a previous post, I urged readers to get QuickSilver, download it and use it as an application launcher. But there are choices of app launchers and QuickSilver is just one option. If launching is all you’re interested in you may prefer DragThing or LaunchBar. QuickSilver is a great deal more than an application launcher, it is a highly effective automation capability. I’d go as far as to say that QuickSilver is:

the productivity hub of keyboard-based usage of the Mac

The fact that QuickSilver is free is almost an absurdity. I’ve paid an awful lot of money for software that’s not a quarter as useful as QuickSilver. If you want to be really productive on the Mac then you need QuickSilver. It’s as simple as that. QuickSilver actually changes the way that you use the Mac, because it allows you to do most things from the keyboard - and as I’ve said before, the keyboard beats the mouse almost every time as far as productivity is concerned.  There is no other product like QuickSilver on the Mac or on any other platform (as far as I’m aware). However, QuickSilver has one drawback: there is no quick-start-for-the non-geek-guide that tells you how to get going fast and do useful stuff.

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