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The Apple Blog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
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Sapiens
Like me you may have tried out various application (and/or file) launchers now and then and possibly none have grabbed you enough to make them a regular part of your Mac life, what with their sometime idiosyncratic design philosophy and all.

If have somehow missed out on the whole launcher family of apps; if you, as many people do, travel from your hard drive icon, to applications, to scroll down, to double click, to open application - then you are probably wondering what on earth is the point of another application just to do that. Surely for such a simple task, adding intermediate steps must make it all much more complicated? Well, possibly to start with, but not after a little practice, and there is a sweet smooth swiftness to knowing your machine well enough to be able to launch any application in a second or two with a couple of key strokes. It's a control thing. It's a delight thing.

The mother of all launchers, the UberLauncher, is Quicksilver. Quicksilver quite rightly gets a lot of press. It was amazing the last time I tried it and I'm just about to give it another go after rediscovering it via Quicksilver: The Guide.

Searching and launching applications is however the very tip of Quicksilver's considerable, iceberg like abilities and for me this depth and ability was, and possibly will be again, just too much. Quicksilver is a whole world and needs time and effort to explore and appreciate. So many worlds, so little time.

My own road to regularly using an application launcher has been patchy and inconsistent. Or, I would argue, I'm picky and like to test choices out thoroughly before settling on just one. I won't list out the choices, but, for now at least, I have settled on one: Sapiens.

Sapiens has only the basic application launcher functionality of the heavyweights in its field but has a visual simplicity which defies it's underlying basic intelligence. Sapiens sometime idiosyncratic design philosophy is a radial one - a radial look and a supposedly radial launch facility via circular mouse gesturing. More about that later.

The radial look is very nice. Sapiens can mirror your desktop through the interface, or not, and lays out your 13 most commonly used applications in sensible groups. If an application is already open then, of course, it doesn't show up in the Sapiens interface, the next most regularly used application takes it's place. The search is adaptive via the 'Brain' and Sapiens will learn which applications are your favourites; favourites get a more prominent placement; ah, twas ever thus.

The search is also user adaptable via a right click where you can either increase or decrease an application's importance or even tell Sapiens to forget about it completely. There is a simple but complete Tools menu which does everything you may need behind the scenes and five different gui layouts to choose from.

Enter will launch a centrally placed application from Sapiens, so that in theory one circular mouse gesture and one click will launch your most used application. Now it may work for you but I found this circular mouse gesture just isn't available in my muscle memory so I have opted to open Sapiens via a double shift-click, an option available from the Tools menu; no problemo then, three clicks not two, not too shabby.

If the application you want isn't visible when Sapiens opens, if it isn't one of the applications you use very often, then just start typing its name with the Sapiens interface open and Sapiens will search for it, exactly like Spotlight. Once you see the icon pop up in Sapiens you're off.

Prior to Sapiens I was used to using Spotlight via Cmd Spacebar to search for everything, but I love the focus of Sapiens. It launches applications - that's it.

And this may be why my re-entry into the world of Quicksilver will fail once more.

So many worlds, so little time.

Комментарии к сообщению:
http://theappleblog.com/2007/12/04/sapiens/#comments
Xslimmer
Hard disk space can be extremely valuable, especially for notebook owners. I find myself constantly auditing the contents of my disk, usually with tools like GrandPerspective and WhatSize to find the gremlins that are munching on my available space. Of course my Applications folder always pops up as the biggest offender, but there’s nothing I can do about the whopping 4 GB required for stuff like Final Cut Studio 2, right? I mean, every line of code under the hood of Motion is being used isn’t it?

Apparently not. A little app called Xslimmer claims to free up wasted disk space by removing unnecessary code from Universal Binaries that doesn’t fit with your machine’s architecture. It will also remove unneeded languages from various apps (Adium, for example, has over 20 languages according to Xslimmer’s site) to help slim them down and recover your disk space.

How it Works

Xslimmer’s interface is extremely straightforward. You simply drag applications onto Xslimmer and in analyzes each one to see if it can be slimmed. If the app can be slimmed, Xslimmer will display the current size of the app and it’s estimated “slimmed” size. Some applications cannot be slimmed because there is no extra code or languages, or its on Xslimmer’s blacklist (which, as the name implies, are applications that are not allowed to be slimmed for various reasons). For example, most of CS3 sits on the blacklist:

You can add apps one by one or use the “Genie” to scan your entire disk for potentially fat binaries. When you’re ready, click the “Slim!” button and you’ll be prompted with a warning to back up your applications. You can choose to have Xslimmer save backups somewhere locally, so that you can make sure all applications run as expected after slimming and restore them if needed. Restoring is a simple process - just click the “History” button, and click the restore icon in the history dialog.

The Skinny

I was able to save 2.5 GB from 95 applications in less than ten minutes (though I won’t see my real disk savings until I nuke my backups). That beats the heck out of the 100mb or so that it would take me hours to free up by sifting through all my documents that might be scattered across my machine. Even better, your apps will run the same or even faster than they did before slimming (though there are potentially applications that will not run after the slimming process - good thing the backups seem to be sound).

Overall, Xslimmer is extremely intuitive and kind of fun to use, especially when you see some of the notable savings:

Automator: 28.7mb to 2.95mb
Calculator: 13.4mb to 1.59mb
Disk Utility: 32.7mb to 3.88mb
DVD Player: 42.7mb to 6.48mb
iTunes: 129mb to 31.4mb
Preview: 70.1mb to 9.71mb

At $11.95, Xslimmer is a steal. My only real gripe is that you can’t slim Adobe CS3 apps, but I think that’s something to take up with Adobe and not Xslimmer. You can try a demo and save up to 50mb, if you wanna take it for a test drive before you drop the cash. I would strongly suggest that you make sure that all your apps run as expected after slimming though. I haven’t experienced any issues yet, but better safe than sorry.

Комментарии к сообщению:
http://theappleblog.com/2007/11/28/review-xslimmer/#comments