Use Quicksilver for quick timed reminders

Aug 29, '06 07:30:02AM

Contributed by: mcgraths

Anyone who has used Quicksilver will know that it is the swiss army knife of all applications. There is so much you can do with this application and recently I stumbled upon one little feature that most people may not know about.

Using the latest version, B49, I found two interesting actions: Run at Time... and Run after Delay.... For the longest time, I couldn't figure out what type of object would have these actions defined. Then when I was playing around with the Proxy Objects in the Catalog section, I noticed the Last Command object. I tried fooling around with it, and low and behold, there was Run at Time... and Run after Delay... in the Action list! There are tons of possibilities for these actions, but one that I thought was very interesting was the ability to set quick reminders for yourself.

Try the following in Quicksilver (assuming you have the two actions enabled and the Proxy Objects catalog active):

  1. Bring up Quicksilver.
  2. Enter text mode by pressing the period key.
  3. Run the following .... Reminder Text (Large Type). This is what you reminder will be. I haven't found a way yet to bypass having to run the command once before setting it on a timer. Maybe there is a way to do this, maybe not. If anyone knows, please speak up.
  4. Now set up the timer. Run the following: Last Command (Run after Delay...) 15s
There you have it, a quick and easy way to display a reminder message in a set amount of time. You can specify a number of minutes as well in the format: 45m. I haven't tried hours, but I am assuming 3h would run the command in three hours. You can even mix minutes and seconds, so 3m 30s would work. Alternatively, you could run the reminder at a set time by doing this:

Last Command (Run at Time...) 9:25am

This isn't limited to just displaying messages in large type either. By changing the first command, you could do things like launch a website or application or script at a given time, or start playing a song after a set amount of time.

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