I love Julius Eckert’s creations. Especially his Quicksilver plugins — I would not use QS without BezelHUD (above)1. Recently, Silverflow went in public beta. I gave it a quick spin before taking the screenshot and hitting return.
First and foremost, never to be said I am deriding developers. Silverflow is a fine piece of a plugin, creative, show-offy and sleek — really, almost all the qualities a graphical user interface needs to have.
Except usability.
The problem is not with Silverflow, but rather the unholy union of QuickSilver and CoverFlow. You see, QS’s extended Result-List shows up at the bottom of the window. CoverFlow moves horizontally. So, you must navigate different axes in the two different scenarios. Silverflow uses CoverFlow’s UI (hinting at horizontal interaction) and QuickSilver’s menu model (that requires vertical interaction). So the brain says “left / right” but the application does “up / down”, and that kind of discord does not lead to great productivity, which is what many QuickSilver users are after.
Maybe there is something I am missing about this plugin. I know a lot of people say CoverFlow is being abused by applications, but in certain cases it really does shine. I am afraid that, despite the developer’s great work, this is not one of those cases.
- Exaggeration [↩]
