Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

In my quest for additional optimization I recently downloaded and tried the mac app Launchbar. In general I do not believe in loading down your computer with tons of software in an attempt to convince yourself that you are a ‘power user’ but I am going to make an exception for Launchbar. This thing rocks as a research tool. Let me tell you why.

For years I have been trying various work-arounds, add-ons, macros, and scripts to make it eaiser to get information about books and journal articles. For books I find myself constantly switching between my library’s catalog, Amazon, Google Books. For journals I am constantly moving between Google Scholar, various Big Content sites (JSTOR etc.), and my university’s clunky interface for getting me past content firewalls. Nothing has worked really well and I’ve resigned myself flipping through multiple tabs in a browser and — horror of horrors — taking my hand off the keyboard and on the mouse, sapping precious milliseconds from my research routine.

Launchbar as a ’search template’ function that makes it incredibly easy to to create custom searches of websites: you basically just copy the URL of a successful search, look around for the string you originally searched for in there, and replace it with an asterisk. To invoke the search you just do command-space bar (what used to be the Spotlight shortcut) and type the name of the search template you want to use and hit return. Then you type your search string, hit return again, and a new browser tab is open with the result.

The genius of launchbar is that it trains itself to guess what search template you are going to use. It only takes a search or two for it to learn that ‘g’ means ‘google’, ‘gb’ means ‘google books’, and so forth. This means that with just a few keystrokes, in any application, you can check out a book, the author’s departmental homepage, or pretty much anything else. No more tabbing between windows or clicking on search windows to get the cursor in a place where you can type your query in.

It speeds up searches by, like, orders of magnitude. For anything.

Apparently it can do lots of other things — like the coveted ‘send as an attachment to an email the PDF file I’m looking at now to someone in my addressbook’. If you are really into controlling your entire computer through a single command line then this is the app for you. But if you are just a normal person who wants to do normal things like locate and save Anna Tsing’s entire scholarly output — fliers for guest lectures on her campus and all — in under ten minutes then you will quickly find that this application is like crack and you will turn into one of the junkie guys in The Wire.

Serious.