But you can also quickly visit a Web site in your browser by activating LaunchBar, pressing Command+L (or just. For starters, you can browse your Safari bookmarks and history. LaunchBar 4 also offers some new features for Web browsing. Similarly, when Address Book is the selected app, pressing right-arrow browses contacts choosing one and pressing return opens that contact in Address Book. For example, when the selected application is iTunes, pressing right-arrow lets you browse your iTunes Library by song, playlist, album, artist, composer, or genre choosing an item from the list plays it in iTunes. LaunchBar can also browse the databases of particular applications. You use LaunchBar’s Preferences and Configuration dialogs-the latter of which resembles the Spotlight pane of System Preferences-to choose what LaunchBar searches. And as I mentioned above, you can search bookmarks, email messages (in Mail), contacts (in Mail or Entourage), browser history, and much more.
Or, if you press Tab when LaunchBar is active, you get a list of files at the root level of your hard drive you can use the arrow keys to browse through those files and folders until you navigate to what you’re looking for.) You can also open individual panes of System Preferences (for example, typing displays gives you the Displays pane as the first hit). (How do you view a folder in LaunchBar? By typing its name, of course. You can even drag files and drop them onto an application or a folder in LaunchBar to open them in that application or move or copy them to that folder, respectively, making LaunchBar a handy file management utility. For example, if you activate LaunchBar and press Command+R, you get a list of currently running applications, providing a way to quickly switch between them. In fact, because LaunchBar is so much better than Spotlight at finding and launching applications, I’ve used the Spotlight pane of System Preferences to disable application searching by Spotlight-which also improves Spotlight’s performance, as it has one less type of file to search.īut LaunchBar isn’t limited to finding and opening files and applications. In addition, unlike Spotlight, which on some computers takes metaphorical ages to find an application, LaunchBar is nearly instantaneous. Like Spotlight, highlighting an item and pressing return opens it pressing Command+return views it in the Finder. For example, if I type xl in LaunchBar, it guesses what I might be looking for and presents a list of possible matches-depending on how I’ve configured LaunchBar’s preferences, those items can include applications, documents, contacts, bookmarks, music files, and many other kinds of items. LaunchBar, on the other hand, performs “educated guess” searches. If you type disku in Spotlight’s search field, Spotlight will find only those items on your hard drive that contain the exact phrase disku in their names or contents (on my system, just DiskUtility.log). Spotlight’s strength is finding files-especially documents-via literal searches. But the two are actually quite different and have different strengths.
In fact, when Steve Jobs first demoed Spotlight, a number of people sitting around me at the keynote wondered aloud if Tiger would be the death of LaunchBar. For those using Tiger who haven’t tried LaunchBar, the above description of its usage likely sounds strikingly familiar to Spotlight.
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