I tend to do a lot of plaintext writing in Mac OS X’s TextEdit, since it has all features I need to write things down. Unfortunately, it does not have a word count feature.
Enter Devon Technologies’ Word Service. A free download, Word Service lets you get a word count from any app that has a Services menu. Nice.
It looks like Safari 4 copies Chrome’s UI wholesale. Besides Safari’s separate “Address” and “Search” boxes, everything — including Top Sites — is the same. On Windows, the similarity is even more striking. For example, compare this image to this one. Notice that, in addition to the titlebar tabs’ position and the top sites grid, Apple has also copied the “page” and “gear” menus to the left of the location field.
I’ve been using the new Google Quick Search app for a few days now and I really like it. A few quick notes:
It gives me instant access to my Google Docs. This is awesome.
Google says that it’s a “prototype,” and they’re not kidding. The app runs smoothly for the most part, but every once in a while it starts hogging one of my CPUs and I need to kill it.
The app attempts to integrate web and local searches, and the implementation is pretty good. For example, typing “height of mount everest” and hitting enter takes you immediately to the Google results page.
Many Quicksilver features — such as being able to copy, move, or delete files on the fly, or drill down into folders — are not present. I’m not sure if Google plans to add them as the app matures, but fact that Quicksilver’s lead developer now works at Google is promising.
Despite the lack of features, Google Quick Search’s interface makes much more sense than Quicksilver’s default. It’s even (slightly) customizable.
For the time being I’ll keep using it. Quicksilver was too huge and unwieldy for me — hopefully with some development time Google Quick Search will become a fantastic desktop tool.
