Bren at Slacker Manager is finally switching to Mac. He’s a longtime ActiveWords user, and expressed hope that Quicksilver would be a decent replacement. I commented that Quicksilver eats ActiveWords’ lunch:

I almost never use [ActiveWords]. Nearly every time I open ANYthing, it bugs me to add a word. It makes me stop what I’m doing to figure out what word to use. Then I have to remember later what word I picked, and move my hands away from the home row to find F8 and hit it. The interface looks like it was written in VB 5….

Quicksilver, OTOH, is invisible unless I call it up with the super quick two-thumb hotkey. I start typing and it shows matches while I type. No shortcuts to remember, except for Cmd-space. The more I use it, the faster it gets, because it learns from me. And it does so much more than just open apps or folders. And it’s FREE!

Whereupon someone at ActiveWords emailed me to find out how I really felt. I won’t name or quote him, because I don’t know the netiquette for that sort of thing. His points are below in italics; my thoughts follow.

  • The auto suggest feature of ActiveWords can be disabled. I started it on purpose, hoping it would be a little more intelligent. After I’ve launched the same folder or app n times (where n is configurable), it interrupts me with a Clippy-style “ActiveWords has detected that you have been using such-and-such a lot. What would you like to do?” As a developer, I frequently access folders and sites with similar names on several different servers. There’s no real shortcut naming convention I could follow. Quicksilver would pop up a list of matching locations and narrow it down as I type. Instant feedback, with no up-front cost.

  • If you have a hard time remembering what shortcut you use for a particular app, give it several shortcuts. This involves less thinking on the back end (when you invoke the shortcut), but more thinking on the front (when you create it). My goal is less thinking, period. Quicksilver interprets anything I type. Again, instant feedback. No learning curve — Quicksilver does the learning for me, to make the match faster next time.

  • The interface is designed to be simple, and few people complain about it. There are two options: dock the toolbar at the top of the screen, or dock the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Yes, I know it can be auto-hidden. Auto-hide in this context is an abuse of Fitts’ Law. Auto-hidden items pop up when you least want them, and refuse to go away at random times. For Pete’s sake, ActiveWords is supposed to reduce your dependence on the mouse. There’s no need for a permanent toolbar. If there’s a way to disable the toolbar altogether, I couldn’t find it. I can’t tell what the icons do (why do I need icons?). The one that looks like an alarm clock says “Productivity Center” when I hover over it. I rest my case.

  • You don’t have to hit a hotkey to trigger ActiveWords. This one is subtle but essential. As I mentioned in my original comment, Quicksilver’s hotkey is less obtrusive than ActiveWords’ F8. I can hit Cmd-Space without moving my hands from normal typing position. Two thumbs, bang-bang. It’s even sort of cathartic. Once I’ve done that, my brain is in the right mode to talk to Quicksilver. Emacs or vi nuts will understand what I’m talking about here. With ActiveWords, I have to switch modes anyway to think of the shortcut and type it. Then I have to pick up my right hand, find F8 and hit it. Once that’s done, ActiveWords either a) launches my app or b) tells me it couldn’t resolve my shortcut. Option a means everything is ok and my brain goes back to what it was thinking about. Option b stops me cold. I never know which I’m going to get.

These are examples of why Windows software aggravates, while so much Mac software is perceived as friendly and fun. Write this down, Windows developers: it’s not about your app. It’s about the work the user is trying to accomplish. Good interfaces get out of your way; they don’t interrupt your train of thought to make you think about them.

One or two other thoughts:

  • Quicksilver does a lot more than just launch stuff. Its real power is in its plugins. I can browse my iTunes content or my del.icio.us links. I can copy and paste into and out of it. I can run shell commands out of it. Quicksilver has a flow to it; you pipe information to it, do something to it, do something else to it, and get other information back out. It’s a uniform frontend for all your applications. After all, it’s about your work, not the app.

  • Did I mention it’s FREE!?

Update 8.5.05: Slacker Manager has posted their own AW vs. QS cage match. This one is coming from the perspective of a longtime ActiveWords user and, as such, is probably more objective than mine.

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