It’s taken me a while to jump on the Quicksilver bandwagon. If you’re a Mac user chances are you’ve run into QS as some point, as it seems to be one of the core apps that most hardcore mac users recommend. There are tons of great links on del.icio.us, posts by Merlin Mann and even screencasts. Safe to say it’s here to stay, and with it now open source and hosted on Google, it has a future ahead of it.

Explaining what Quicksilver is might best be left to the wikipedia entry, but to put it short Quicksilver is used to launch apps and control them using short, quick keystrokes. The hardest part about Quicksilver may just be finding out how can use it to make things you do faster. One of the best ways to handle this is to actively think about anything you do often and see if it could be done using Quicksilver. There’s a few Quicksilver tasks that I’ve recently started using that might be useful.

Add Items to a RememberTheMilk.com todo list
I’m a recent convert to RememberTheMilk and it’s related IPhone app, so linking these extremely common tasks was a top priority. There is a quicksilver plugin for remember the milk that makes this quick. Initially when the plugin is added, you’ll need to authorize it to work via the quicksilver preferences. After that it’ll import your task lists and make them available to add to directly. Putting them all together it looks like this.

Send tickets to a Lighthouse app project
There’s no magic plugins for this one — just the basics. Lighthouse allows you to create tickets by email for a specific project. Just about any bug tracking/project management app has a similar capability that can be invoked via Quicksilver. There’s a number of different ways to do this, but the basic one is to create an entry in Address Book titled something related to your app. It has the added bonus of being able to add a contact image that will show up in Quicksilver.

Get fast access to commonly used text
One feature of Quicksilver that gets a lot of coverage is the Shelf. It’s basically a way to access things fast. These “things” can be plain text, folders, applications — basically anything that shows up in quicksilver in the first pane. To enable the shelf, go to plugins in preferences and make sure the “Shelf module” is checked off. After that you can try putting something on the shelf to test it out. To do that just enter some text in the first pane, and then put on shelf

After you have at least one item on the shelf, you should be able to pull it up in the first pane using shelf. show contents is used to get a list of what’s actually on your shelf.

This Shelf > Show Contents combination gets old real fast, so you might want to consider moving this to a trigger. In Preferences > Triggers > Custom Triggers you can create a new keyboard command that jumps you straight into the shelf. I went with option+command for this. Only takes a few keystrokes!

What killer users for Quicksilver have you found? Or perhaps other uses for the shelf?

Over at IZEA there are a lot of balls up in the air at any given time. Lately Dan and I have been concentrating on a relatively new creation — CloudShout. It fits in nicely with the blog focused atmosphere for IZEA, and we’re both pretty excited about it. It already has a lot going for it, and I hear what’s available now with it is just the tip of the iceberg. Either way it’s something new and interesting, that I think you’ll be hearing a lot more about in the months to come.

Cloudshout is, in the most basic terms, a widget that can be installed on any site that enables realtime communication across the interwebs. It provides a open way for new developers to create javascript applications that can be installed by any user or site using CloudShout. One of the best ways to see what’s possible is to check out some sample applications. Just click on application tab in the widget and it’ll show what’s installed on my blog. Here are some applications that are already available:

• A group chat application (chat has to be realtime of course)
• An app that pull recent tweets from the blog owner, and even tweets from other site visitors
• An app that pulls recent flickr photos from the blog owner, and other photos from site visitors
• Multiple games — like checkers
• A “Growl” like application that shows activity for the site (if you’re using a mac and don’t use Growl it’s worth checking out)

It’s important to note that any of these applications are updated immediately as new visitors come to the site. So lets say while you’re reading this blog post someone new comes to my site. They’ll show up immediately on the right, and you’ll be able to view tweets, or play checkers with them. Having realtime communication and the ability to send Javascript to other users really opens up a whole new world of application possibilities, so we’re thinking of, and hearing suggestions about new applications every day.

We Have the Technology

You can check for yourself how it’s all done, but it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise — ajax using script tag insertion. Since you can’t use XMLHttpRequest across domain (well until cross-site XmlHttpRequest becomes mainstream), it has to include script tags occasionally to get updates from the server. It does all of this by having the site owner include a single javascript file and creating a div with a specific ID. After that just hit the URL and you’ll see the widget.

The main hub itself and any applications you write have full access to JQuery, which I’m definitely falling for. We’re still looking into how to incorporate some kind of a library to take advantage of the huge amount of Jquery plugins and extensions that are available, but until then the basic jQuery should keep you busy.

Developing applications is easy, especially if you use Textmate. There’s a bundle available that allows editing application code locally and saving it to CloudShout. When developing you’ll get a URL to include on some sample page (usually stored locally) that will load the base widget and only your application. You can make changes and view them in this sandbox, then publish your application once it’s perfect. At that point one someone from IZEA will review it (no nasty hacks or bad code, etc) and then it’ll be available for anyone to install to their blog.

Oh there’s more?
At first some of this was sounding a bit like Google Site Widgets (which I heard about once then never again) — a way to enable some basic dynamic functionality. The difference is astounding though. CloudShout is realtime, open, extendable and just more badass in general. It’s also not specific to a single site. There’s quite a bit more to it, and for some you can watch Dans talk at BarcampTampa.