Everyone waxes on and on about google’s search being so good. Don’t get me wrong, it is good. But many of our desktops are not enjoying that same goodness.

I’ve recently returned to the Macintosh world, with this Mac Book Pro I pickedup a year ago. It is a gorgeous machine in so many ways. When I first started using it, I was comparing all the things in Mac OS X to what I remembered from System 7 + 8. Believe it or not I used to program the toolbox, MacApp, Codewarrior, you name it. But I digress.

The first thing that struck me was how good Spotlight was. And how easy it was to access via Cmd-SPACE. It also struck me that it always seemed to be up-to-date, even with new files I’d just added to the system. It’s speed rivaled Unix’s locate, that I had grown to love using Linux for so many years.

That’s all changed now. It’s all part of an almost laughable past that I barely remember just one week ago, when I discovered the pornographically good Quicksilver.

What’s the big deal you say, another way to launch apps, another way to search your computer. No, this thing is much more. It’s like a whole new way to use your computer. It is so damn good at doing the right thing, that it just reduces steps, and brings you that much closer to communicating with your Mac by pure thought alone!

For starters you change the Spotlight shortcut so Quicksilver can come up with the same Cmd-SPACE you’re used to. You *MAY* wanna tweak some settings, but I didn’t have to do much. Another thing I recommend, remove all your apps from your doc, and from plain site, and use Quicksilver to launch them for a week. You’ll see what I mean. Ok, so it can launch, ok, so it can search, ok so it’s fast. What else?

Here’s an example of some of the surprises I found. Recently I spent a good number of weeks integrating my contact databases. I had one in my phone (a Sidekick which wouldn’t sync with my mac) that had mobile numbers. I had another that I was just putting together in Apple’s Addressbook, importing data from my old PINE addressbook that I had used for so many years. That had email addresses of everyone I’ve ever emailed for 15+ years. And then I had an addressbook in Sugar CRM and contacts in Linkedin. Don’t ask how I got to this sorry state of multiple database contact book madness, me being a DBA and all… Pulling these records all into Apple’s addressbook took time. It was a combination of various manual and automatic processes, massaging data, and eyeing names, for spelling inconsistencies, and redundant entries. After spending all this time, Quicksilver just illuminates my contact database. Search for a name, and the vcard comes up, you can launch addressbook, or display it in a big monster font right in the center of your screen. Of course with copy & paste at the ready! Now here’s the kicker, I went and manually indexed my old pine addressbook text file in Quicksilver, and now when there’s an entry I can’t find, that somehow never made it into the Mac Addressbook, Quicksilver will find it and display it real friendly like!! This is good.

To be fair the integration of all my messed up databases, the purchase of a blackberry which has all 2000+ entries that my Mac Addressbook does, *and* the discovery of Quicksilver all kinda happened at the same time, so that might have inflated my excitement (and don’t even get me started on why I didn’t buy an iPhone). Nah, Quicksilver brings you closer to god!

By now I know that those of you who haven’t used it are gonna go and download a copy, and the rest of you who have it installed but just don’t use it much are gonna take all your apps off the Dock and start using it everyday, right?! If you wanna learn from the horses mouth, I really recommend you check out Nicholas Jitkoff’s Google Tech Talk.

FYI, for the time being Quicksilver is only available for the Mac, though I hear Launchy is quite good on Windows.

This article was originally written while I was guest blogging over at the glorious #comments blog!