LaunchBar vs. Quicksilver

Anyone who has ever talked to me about Mac OS X knows that I think LaunchBar is the best utility ever. As soon as I install a copy of Mac OS X, LaunchBar is the first application I install. If it's not installed, then I find myself hitting command-space and wondering why nothing is happening.

Yesterday I found out about an upstart competitor to LaunchBar named Quicksilver . Lots of people were writing gushing reviews, so I decided to download it and try it out. It's a lot like LaunchBar, but it has more eye-candy and visual modes. It also claimed a few improvements over LaunchBar, such as Internet searches and iLife integration. I thought it had promise, but I decided to move back to LaunchBar since I ran into some bugs while trying to configure my Quicksilver "catalog". (In fairness, QuickSilver is still in beta.)

Today, Objective Development has launched a counterattack with the release of LaunchBar 4 Beta 1 . It has all of the features of Quicksilver and then some. Probably the biggest new feature for me is "Fast, multithreaded indexing engine, performing live index updates in background." It was always annoying to install a new application, try to use LaunchBar to launch it, and then remember that you hadn't rescanned your Applications folder recently. This LaunchBar update should make that a thing of the past.

The Mac OS X application launching utility market is in for some interesting times. Quicksilver has the visual edge, but LaunchBar 4 has more features. Quicksilver is free (at least during the beta), and LaunchBar is $20. Hopefully this competition will result in a wave of innovation that will benefit all Mac users.