Leaf Raker

Merlin Mann, author of the famous 43 folders site, posted a video where the author of Quicksilver (A1c0r) talks about why he wrote Quicksilver the way he did:

43 Folders: Quicksilver demo by Nicholas Jitkoff

It’s a must-see for every Quicksilver fan!

Ways to quickly launch the screen saver are useful, esspecially in an environment where one want to lock the machine when stepping away from the desk.

The probably most common way is to define a “Hot Corner” (under System Preferences -> Desktop & Screensaver -> Screen Saver -> Hot Corners) to launch the screen saver. After doing so a quick move of the mouse into the specified corner will engage the screen saver.

My problem with this method is that I rarely use the track pad on my Mac Book Pro, so decided to use a Quicksilver keyboard trigger to engage the screen saver.

First Step: How can we launch the screen saver with Quicksilver? All we need to do is open the Screen Saver Engine, which is located here:

Therefore, we launch Quicksilver, enter Text Mode by typing a period and enter the path to the engine. Quicksilver should look something like this:

The only thing left to do is to define a keyboard trigger. I’m using “Shift/Control/Command-L” as my trigger.

This key combination may sound a bit awkward at first, but I’m using “Shift/Control/Command” for all my Quicksilver trigger. The nice thing about this combination is that it rarely cause conflicts with other keyboard shortcuts, and once you are used to this combination it’s really not this bad. So in this case I combined it with the letter “L”, for “Lock”.

Nocturne, a nifty little application from the creator of Quicksilver, let’s you switch the display of your Mac into night vision mode:

This “night vision mode” is more than just a toy - there are situations when it comes in very handy! I like to use it in meetings and presentations where the light in the room are dimmed down. In those situations, the “night vision display” makes the display more comfortable for my eyes and reduces the annoyance of the bright laptop display for other people in the room.

The only drawback to Nocturne is that (to my knowledge) it doesn’t have an easy way to toggle between night vision and normal display with Quicksilver - so here is my solution:

Once Nocturne is set to “night vision” it will remember this setting and switch the display immediately when invoked. So all I needed was an application that would start Nocturne if it’s not running and quit Nocturne otherwise. A short apple script does this job for me:

You can download this script here: toggleNocturne

That’s it. Save this script as an application and define a keyboard trigger in Quicksilver (I used Shift-Control-Command-N) to invoke it.