What works

The developers of Magicwords must be true Slickrun fans/devotees. They have tried to make this perfect clone. Right upto the “Import QRS” file option. The import worked fine. Adding a new magic word was better than from SlickRun. I’m not aware of hotkey to add a magicword in SlickRun. I always used the setup magicword, and then New Magicword button, followed by the dropper to pickup the application. Here, I was pleasantly surprised that there is a dedicated hotkey for adding a magicword (Default CtrlF11) But more surprisingly, when invoked, it picked up the application under focus as the filename. This can be very handy during initial setup.

What doesn’t work:

The UI can use a lot of improvement. I understand that this is supposed to be command line toolbar, but then considering that this is after all Windows based software, one expects certain polish. This is what sets apart “hobby coders” from Professional grade software (paid or free)

The setup option brings up a dialog box with 5 tabs. The first one is probably most used, and comes with two default magic words. Slickrun’s default list is far better.

Magicwords Library

The next tab is named Tools. It wasn’t clear as to what is its purpose. It came up with no entires listed. There is no apparent way to add any entries either.

Magicword Tools

Other two tabs you can see here namely Parameters Plugin and Help, are also read-only tabs . Parameter Plugin tab lists how to use the parameters like $I$, $W$ etc with the magic words. Slickrunners would be at ease here. But this is probably helpful for some one who has never used Slickrun, or at least never used parameters with their SlickRun magic words. Good addition, but doesn’t justify a separate tab, in my opinion. This could have been covered in Help tab itself.

The Help tab renders Wiki page from the Project’s website. This means no help available in offline mode. It would have been better to have a local copy of the HTML help file.

This brings me to the ugliest and buggy tab ever, the Options tab.

MagicWords Options

I did not like the over all look. The fonts chosen are too inconsistent. When modified, the “Size”, changes were not reflected. Same goes for the Hotkey. I changed the default CtrlF12 to AltF12. Didn’t work. But the background color change was saved and reflected immediately.

Conclusion

In terms of features, I think it supports most of the features (and more) of Slickrun, but in terms of stability it is far behind. (After all, SlickRun is at 3.9 as of this writing) MagicWords crashed within 5 minutes of use. The error was related to .Net Framework. This says it all about stability.

Overall, a promising SR clone, that is not just there, yet.

My Clean Desktop

All I have is nice picture occupying the full screen (Thanks to Webshots). I find the calendar Feature of Webshots very handy. I can see three months at a stretch. To the right I have my todo list. I maintain the todo list using todo.sh scripts created by Gina Trapani of Lifehacker. I use Active Desktop feature to display it on the screen. todo.sh has option to sort of contents by priority and then color code it. But is works only in a shell. So I created my own standalone PHP parser to create the color coded output that I want.

Finally, slickrun to launch many of my frequently used apps and URLs. Font size used is 48. Nice and Big Date and Time display.

Update : (Dec 5th, 2008)  Only difference since originally this was published, is that I graduated to Executor from slickrun

1. WordWeb: Offline dictionary
2. SlickRun: The magical floating ‘Run’ bar

WordWeb: Offline dictionary

English is not my native language, but I’ve gotten better with it over a period of time. My 3.5 yrs in US may have helped a lot in that respect. But I still I am unaware of a LOT of new words, that I come across. wordweb helps address this to some extent.
You can highlight a word in ANY application and then invoke WordWeb using a hotkey. Default is Ctrl-Alt-W, but you can define other is you want. It also shows the phonetic spelling of the word in each context, helping you to prnounce it correctly as well.
I think best part I like about WW is that it is available all the time, even when one is NOT connected to internet. That is where it scores big time.
Note: While I was writing that you can use wordweb with ANY application, I realized that it didn’t work with gvim7

Slickrun: The magical floating ‘Run’ bar

I have always been a UNIX person so to speak, because my career started working on Solaris. I have always used and worked on Windows machines as my primary workstation, but was always comfortable with command line and other UNIXy things like vi. In fact this entry is also being written in gvim 7.0, but more about gvim later.
So I do prefer and use windows “Run” bar to invoke various utilities from time to time, say calc, notepad etc. I came to know about SlickRun thru one of the Productivity websites (can’t remember which one) I tried it and was hooked onto it instantly.

Slickrun as I mentioned, is a floating toolbar. One can defined a hotkey which will invoke this floating toolbar, that is the first way to reduct reduce the mouse click. Slickrun comes with set of predefined magicwords, and with the ability to define your own ones. magicwords are shortcuts for various frequently used programs that you need to invoke. It lets you customize the appearance, like the background of the flatong bar, the font size, colour etc.

Initially I added the most frequently used programs in the magicword list, and as and when notice myself using particular program frequently, I’ll add it to the list. New Magicword tab of Slickrun has one cool feature called a dropper. You can drag the dropper to a already running program and it will automatically grab the pathname. You can also pass parameters to the binary , and test the new magic word to see if everything works. Slickrun is not limited to invoking programs alone, it can let you open a folder as well.

One more feature I like is auto-completion. It works for the magicwords as well as for filenames. So invoking a frequently used program can take as less as two keystrokes. One Hotkey and then first alphabet of the magicword.

To be continued ….

Part I