This week's Pick of the Week is for those of the Quake generation. Ever wish OS X had a Quake-like Terminal, invokable via a hot key? Well, with Visor, it can. Install this plug-in (you'll also need to have SIMBL installed), and as long as Terminal is running, you can drop-down a Terminal window, Quake style, from the top menu bar. The default key combo is Control-F1, though it's easily customized. When Terminal is running, you'll also see the Visor icon in your menubar -- use this to invoke Visor, or to set its preferences.
In Visor's preferences, you control the transition (how quickly it slides and fades, or whether it does so at all), as well as whether or not the menu bar icon is visible or not. One of the more visually interesting, though not necessarily useful, features is also hiding here: the ability to set any Quartz Composer animation as a live Visor background:
That's Visor, greatly shrunken down, running with the Particle System Quartz Composer animation (from the Developer Tools) as the background. Definitely not something I'd probably use every day, but it'd sure look neat in demos!
Visor isn't perfect -- you'll find a list of some known issues (along with some workarounds) on the website. But having a drop-use-hide Terminal available at the touch of a hotkey is quite useful, and you can't beat the price.