Stikkit quick with Quicksilver
There are few applications that truly revolutionize the way you use your computer. And only one I've ever come across that utterly invigorates every interaction and application, every nook and cranny. Of course I'm talking about Quicksilver for OS X, described by its author Nicholas Jitkoff as: "A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data." A bold claim—and at the same time a rather vague one. Yet Quicksilver delivers. Whether it clocks you from the word go or quietly sneaks up on you through daily use, QS has a habit of enriching the apps it touches (and there are few it doesn't).As an avid QS'er (Quicksilverer?), I was thrilled when Merlin Mann tipped me a little while back to the fact that he'd roped Nicholas into building a full-fledged QS plug-in for Stikkit. The plug-in enables you to send text to a new stikkit, edit an existing one, append and prepend, search by text and tag, jump right to the Stikkit you were after, and more. True to form, QS has again revolutionized the way I use yet another app—this time my own.
(If you're a Quicksilver user, simply type Command-Space or your QS trigger of choice, Command-" to get to the plug-ins list, select "Refresh list of plug-ins" from the actions gear at the bottom of the window, and the Stikkit plug-in should show up in the list.)
Fabulous work, Nicholas!
P.s. I'd be remiss in not giving props to AppleScripting talents of Stikkit user iNik who first plugged QS into Stikkit.
Labels: api, plug-in, quicksilver, stikkit
posted by Rael #
15 Comments:
I had a little trouble with the Stikkit plugin at first because I did not realize that once it's installed you have to add your stikkits to QS's catalog. But once you do that QS indexes all your stikkits so they can be searched, viewed, and edited from the QS window. And of course you can create new ones. Amazing.
Wow. Seriously cool. I love QS, and am really getting to like Stikkit an awful lot (can't wait for Sandy either). Any streamlined way to combine the two has to be a good thing.
now stikkit is within easier reach than the stickies on my dashboard, which means i have no reason not to actually use it. excellent!
is merlin mann using a different version of the stikkit qs plugin? the version i have (v. 111) permits creating stikkits, but not editing or appending to existing stikkits. any documentation?
bbebop, you have to enable cataloging of stikkits. it's under the + dropdown in the catalog pane (cmd-;). then you can type the title of a stikkit and use the other actions on it.
everybody, one thing worth knowing is that when you create, append, prepend, or edit, it gives you a new entry with exactly the stikkit text that it saved -- but it doesn't update the catalog entry. so if you type the title of that stikkit again, it won't have your edits until you rescan the stikkit catalog.
nonetheless i love this plugin, i've been using it all day!
This is very nice. I will be playing with this today.
This may not be the best place to ramble on about it, but since I'm not sure what the best place is:
I love the idea of Stikkit. I really really want to use it. But opening the webpage each time is just a little too time consuming to be available for those immediate notes I want to take.
What I do instead is keep a journal.txt and a todo.txt and use Quicksilver to access them. It's immediate. If someone calls me, I can open journal.txt and take notes, but I can't get to Stikkit fast enough.
Quicksilver will help with that, but I don't see it as the perfect solution to this particular problem. Quicksilver is magical, indispensable, but text editing is not Quicksilver's strong point.
Neither is text editing Stikkit's strong point. Stikkit's strong point is in its *presentation* of information. There's nothing special about how you *enter* information- you just type it in, the same way you would type into a text file. The magic of Stikkit is that it lets you view your disorganized notes in an organized way.
A Textmate plugin would be ideal. We could create a folder called Stikkits. In that folder we could put text files. One text file = one Stikkit. The plugin would do a two-way sync between the text files and Stikkit.
I think the three apps together- Quicksilver, Stikkit, and Textmate- would make the perfect productivity suite.
None of this is meant as a criticism *at all*. I love these apps. I'm just rambling.
j, there was a previous stikkit/quicksilver implementation that used applescripts. you could probably adapt it to work with your text editor of choice
Hmmm.. I don't see how to add indexing of my stikkit catalog. I look in my catalog list, hit the plus button but the only thing that's in there is File and Folders, Defaults, Group and Web Search.
Is there something I'm missing?
aha. Restarting QS did the trick
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
it feels a little strange to being able to append to a stikkit as a target.
For instance, I can't select text and then do in QS:
Current Selection >> Append to >> "STIKKIT NAME"
Rather, I can only do
"STIKKIT NAME" >> Append to Stikkit >> [QS text entry mode]
Is there some reason I can't target a stikkit object for the standard QS text append?
I need to be able to do it this way (or at least target catalog objects instead of going into text entry when using the stikkit as the object in QS)
As nice as this is, it's not working for me. I've follow what little directions there are, and when I type "stikkit" it offers either one of my Stikkits or "Stikkit Catalog," but no option to create a new stikkit. I thought it worked this way for me before.
I've tried resetting QS to resolve this but to no avail.
I really wish the qs plugin allowed me to use my peeps as contacs.
This is what ettercap has to say about the plugin :(
HTTP : 198.145.37.154:80 -> USER: my.email@some.com PASS: xxxxxxxx INFO: api.stikkit.com/stikkits.atom?page=25861
plugin no longer works for editting, appending or prepending -- any word on whether this will be fixed?
Post a Comment