Tue - July 20, 2004

Mac3dWatch places a spinning watch ... on your Mac ... in 3d. But beyond the obvious, it's a brilliant screensaver that takes full advantage of OS X's Quartz rendering engine.

Superimposing vertically scrolling text from any of eight RSS news feeds atop a live, rotating analog watch set to your local time, the screensaver provides at-a-glance information about what's happening in the world. Supported feeds include Apple.com, Versiontracker.com, MacFixit.com, MacWorld UK, MacNN.com, MacCentral.com, O' Reilly, and BBC News.

If you remember the old Pointcast Network with fondness, you'll love Mac3dWatch.

While the screen saver is running, you can hit the keys from 0 to 9 to select an RSS channel. Then, as headlines scroll by, you can either tap the spacebar to start and stop them or press a single key to visit a story's news web page in your favorite browser. If only all software were so well-designed and so practical.

As good as it is, version 1.1 leaves room for improvement becaue users cannot specify their own RSS news sources and headline update schedules, and Mac3dWatch requires Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, an operating system upgrade that many Mac users have not made. Perhaps the developer will support user-defined feeds and earlier versions of OS X in subsequent releases.

I'd also love it if this screensaver could alert me when I receive new mail or have a pending iCal event.

Mac3dWatch is free but you'll also need Panther, a compatible ATI or NVIDIA graphics card, and an internet connection to download the feeds.

Quicksilver

Long time readers of this site will remember my fondness for LaunchBar, a versatile, well-supported search utility by Objective Development that not only finds files as fast as you can type a few letters but also launches applications, addresses emails, launches iTunes playlists, and opens folders, web pages, and System Preference panes just as quickly.

LaunchBar has long been the best application in its class, but a cocky new rival called QuickSilver from Blacktree, Inc. threatens to unseat the champion—at least for Panther users. Even in its beta implementation, Quicksilver shows a graphical flair that LaunchBar has never had.

Like LaunchBar, Quickilver lets you find applications, email addresses, web sites, and contact information quickly and easily, while keeping your hands on the keyboard. For example, if you want to send email to your friend Ken, simply activate QuickSilver with a keystroke, type a few letters of his name, and select his email address when it pops right up. You can also display Ken's address and telephone number in large type so you can read it more easily when you dial the phone.

Also like LaunchBar, Quicksilver remains invisible until you need it. The application indexes and parses selected parts of the contents of your hard drive so it can find items matching your searches in record time.

But Quicksilver surpasses LaunchBar in two important respects: it's free and it offers five optional user interfaces to suit individual tastes. By default, Quicksilver uses a window interface that drops down from the menu bar, but you can also choose a menu interface (which slides a bar over he main menu bar at the top of your screen), or a bezel interface that opens a semi-transparent rectangle in the center of your screen. If your contact information for Ken in Apple's Address Book includes his photo, you'll see it when you search for his name.

Quicksilver also offers a unique Clipboard History feature that stores all of the items you've copied or cut, limited only by the available memory. A Shelf window can be used to store multiple files or objects temporarily, such as files from a deeply-nested folder hierarchy that you plan to copy somewhere else.

With the arrival of Apple's vaunted Spotlight technology in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger next January, utilities of this kind may be passé for those Mac users who upgrade their operating systems. But for now, LaunchBar and Quicksilver fill an important niche; the latter, for Panther users, and the former for users of Panther and earlier versions of OS X.

And you can't beat QuickSilver's price.