Quicksilver made me switch to the Mac. It wasn’t the only thing. I’d grown frustrated with Linux, and saw people I respected jumping to the Mac with gusto, but it was Quicksilver—and Merlin Mann’s breathless exhalation of it, that got me to take the $500 I saved for a laptop, and buy a Mac mini instead. Quicksilver changed how I thought about using my computer, and I’d been using a computer since the days of MS-DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1. It was a veritable Swiss Army Knife of functionality, and I could make my computer practically dance with a a Command-Space and a few keystrokes.

But, Alcor, the brilliant mind who gave us Quicksilver, had to put it aside, especially when he was snapped up into the bosom of Google. He at least thought to open source it, and, in time, developers came to breathe new life into the app.

Just, not fast enough for some of us.

A couple of years ago, Merlin Mann saw the writing on the wall, and switched to LaunchBar. I saw the same thing, and followed suit. Launchbar was soon joined by Alfred dominating the space that Quicksilver made.

It’s been ten years, and Quicksilver’s new developers have finally put enough into it that they’ve taken it out of beta. I decided to give it a try, wondering if I could, truly, go home again. A few minutes after downloading the app, configuring it, and installing the assortment of plugins that I needed to replicate my Launchbar-based workflow, and installing my long missed BezelHUD plugin, I got down to work.

Everything I loved about Quicksilver was there. So was everything I hated, as well as a few new things. I freely admit that most of those new things were related to plugins, such as the Disk Images Module, and the Things Module, which hadn’t been updated since 2009. These modules were 32-bit, and wouldn’t run on my 64-bit machine and 64-bit Quicksilver install. Disappointing, but understandable. The modules were third-party creations, and the new developers didn’t have access to the source code to recompile. The impetus would be on the unknown developer of Disk Image Module, and on Cultured Code for the Things Module to bring them back to life.

Another disappointment came when trying to use Quicksilver to control iTunes, something I use Launchbar for, a lot. In LaunchBar, I could just hit Command-Space, and start typing a song, an album, an artist, or a playlist, and have it come up. In Quicksilver, I had to type “it” for iTunes, right-arrow into it, type or arrow to the appropriate “Browse” item, and then type the artist, album, song, or whatever I wanted. Attempting to play an album through Quicksilver resulted in a long beachballing, rendering both Quicksilver and iTunes unresponsive for several minutes. [1]

In fact, most of the interactions I had to do with Quicksilver seemed to be more complicated and involved than in Launchbar. This seemed quite odd as, back in the day, Quicksilver made my computer dance. Perhaps in the years between using Quicksilver and Launchbar, I adapted to Launchbar’s own quirks, such as pulling items and using Command key shortcuts to manipulate them, versus Quicksilver’s noun and verb command structures. More likely, I think, is that the Launchbar way of doing things is actually faster. Fundamentally, it’s a religious difference. Launchbar is about learning commands, and muscle memory. Quicksilver is about thinking of sentences, and machine memory. I could sit and use Quicksilver for another year, reteaching it how I think and work, but that’s time I can better spend… working.

Make no mistake, Quicksilver is a beautiful app launcher, and it works great. With a few clicks of various options, and installing a new interface plugin, I felt for a few minutes, like I’d never switched to Launchbar. I’ve never known nostalgia for a mere utility application like the nostalgia I have for Quicksilver. Perhaps running DOSSHELL would be as nostalgic, but in 2013, running DOSSHELL would accomplish nothing but that nostalgia. Somewhere out there is a user for whom Quicksilver 1.0.0 is exactly the app they need to do their work better. It used to be that way for me. It may be again, but for now, I’ll be staying with Launchbar.

Those of us who think a lot about the technology we use become very resistant to change. Call it inertia. We know our operating system of choice, our apps of choice, our hardware of choice, and damned if we’re going to try something else because we know this and we don’t want to learn again. People who don’t put a whole lot of thought into technology have the same symptoms. Why should they switch, if the thing they’re using works? All they care about is whether they can do what they want to do. These two groups exist on a spectrum that twists around and is joined at the ends like a Möbius strip—dyed-in-the-wool, neck bearded Open Source enthusiasts sitting back to back with grumpy corporate CTOs on decade-old Windows XP boxes, neither one knowing the other sits next to them. All they see is the shades of gray fading off in front of them.

A radical change in an established technology will be immediately polarizing to anyone deep in the technology world. The reactions to the original Mac and the reactions to Windows 8 are the same sentiment expressed by different populations, all boiling down to “It’s new, it’s different, and I’d need new software to use it.” However, if you’re wondering why sales of iPhones and iPads have gone through the roof, while the Mac’s market share has grown much more slowly, consider this: While the smartphone and the tablet were not new, per se, the iPhone and iPad were the first of these devices that were designed for the common user, not a geek, or a sales guy who needed e-mail on the road. For all intents and purposes, the iPhone and iPad invented the smartphone and tablet spaces, though “re-invented” is more accurate from a technology standpoint. They’re so far removed from the Palm Treo and Windows for Pen Computing tablets as to be a new thing entirely—and even then, they had grumpy detractors.

Microsoft’s use of a traditional desktop UI on smartphones and tablets in the early 2000s may well have been guided by the idea that a user would already be familiar with it from their PC. “A user already knows to click the Start button,” someone at Microsoft thought, “so they’ll know to do that on Windows CE.” This was true, but it ignored the possibility that there was a better way. I’d love to see the design process behind the Windows CE interface, and if anyone suggested a PalmOS like grid of icons, or some other, new, UI convention. It wouldn’t necessarily be better, either because new UIs aren’t always better, or because the hardware couldn’t make it work—though more likely through inertia—but it would be nice to know someone tried.

Institutional inertia is simply user inertia, writ large. In a technology company, you (with luck) have people using the product they create. There’s a term for this: “eating your own dog food.” The benefit of eating your own dog food is that you can find ways to improve it by scratching your own itches. [1] This, of course, assumes the organizational structure around the product actually allows for that sort of thing, something you’ll see more of in young, small companies than in big ones with layers of management, [2] but this not always the case. It’s the ones furthest from the metal, as it were, who react to changes with rancor, and those people can be inside the company as well as outside.

People complain every time Facebook changes its interface. They complain when Apple changes the iTunes UI. Every change breaks somebody’s workflow, even if it’s a bugfix. It’s psychology, and the further you go towards the joint on the Möbius strip, the more adamant you’ll be that things stay the same. Meanwhile, in the creamy middle, there’s a bunch of people who, perhaps with skepticism, evaluate what’s new, and make the jump. Some even go back if they find they made the wrong choice It may take more goading than others, but everyone who isn’t on the extremes can at least adapt to something different when they need to, or find something that truly is better. Life in the middle is much more interesting than on the extremes of stubborn technological inertia, but for many people that’s exactly why they stick where they are.

I recently picked up a 16 GB SDHC card, with the sole purpose of turning it into a portable, light, emergency drive for my MacBook Pro. The most recent Macs can boot off of a properly formatted SD card [1], so creating a bootable rescue disk was as easy as cloning the recovery partition to the SD card in Disk Utility. This will allow me to reinstall Mac OS on my computer, as long as it can get on the Internet. As I will, hopefully, replace the internal drive with an SSD in the future, this will be very handy.

Of course, that doesn’t take up 16GB of space on a SD card, which leaves me the flexibility to keep other useful tools on there. One thing I picked up from a recent Back to Work is the idea to keep an encrypted disk image on your emergency drive, with a backup of important data, such as your 1Password database. [2] A great idea, except that, knowing me, I’d drop the database file on there, drop the card in its place, and forget to ever update it. Putting a weekly reminder in Things would not be enough. So, I needed to find a way to automate the process and make it as easy as plugging in the SD card.

So I did. And it was surprisingly easy. Here’s how:

1. Create an encrypted sparse bundle on your USB drive or SD card.
2. Install the Do Something When preference pane on your Mac. This is an old preference pane, and still 32-bit. It works, however, even on Mountain Lion.
3. In Automator, create a workflow to mount the sparse bundle, copy the 1Password file, and eject the sparsebundle. If you’re unfamiliar with Automator, Apple has a good basic tutorial, but it’s really drag and drop. I’d provide my workflow, but it’s customized to my file names and device names.
4. Enjoy your freshly backed up 1Password database.

The only dependency I’m worried about in this setup is Do Something When. I’m sure there’s an alternative, probably console-based, I could use to trigger the Automator script that does the bulk of the work, and accomplish the same task with a minor tweak. [3] What I love, however, is that with only a basic set of tools, the lynchpin of which is baked into the OS, I can have my computer do a set of repetitive tasks based solely on the presence of one removable hardware device. Back in the old days, this would require actual tedious scripting, or recording a macro. Now, it’s drag and drop, putting more control of our technology in the hands of almost ordinary users.

If you’re not backing up your most sensitive data in more than one place, you’re begging to lose it. If my hard drive dies, or if I get hacked like Mat Honan, I have a way to unlock my digital life, kept on my person, and kept easily up to date just by plugging it into my machine. And, no, I’m not telling you where I keep it.

It’s not that I fear Google, I just don’t trust them anymore.

Forget about the Google Graveyard, and the imminent death of Reader. Google’s made a pivot away from making cool things supported by ads, to selling ads to support (some) cool things. It’s a small difference on paper, but a massive difference in how we relate to a company that many of us have uploaded our lives to. The reason we did this in the first place, was that Google’s offerings were simply better. If you used web based email in the dark days before Gmail, you understand what I’m talking about. Nobody, and I mean nobody, has done web based email as good as Google does it. [1] That’s the blessing and the curse, and now we’re (more) aware of both of those.

I don’t blame Google as a company, or Larry Page as an executive. I blame who Google has chosen to be beholden to. Google is a public company, publicly traded and owned by a lot of people, directly and indirectly. It is to the benefit of those owners that Google show year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter growth in revenue and profit. Whether this is to Google’s benefit is up to debate, but in order to keep those people happy, Google has made the decision to run with the “profits over products” mantra that is the shameful standard among companies these days. I don’t need to say who the notable outlier is.

The stock market is a system that evolved in the days when most companies big enough to be publicly traded were in the business of making real, tangible things. To make more money, you either made and sold more things, sold the same number of things, but at a lower cost to you, or both. [2] When you don’t have a tangible thing to sell, whether it’s a service, or an infinitely replicable string of bits that takes up no real physical space, the old ways of making money break down. Look at the record industry for an example. Though Google’s gotten into the physical goods game with buying Motorola and selling the Chromebook Pixel, it’s still mostly dealing with intangibles. There’s no scarcity, and the costs are as low as they can go.

The business end of Google is plugged into a system designed for a much different economy, one where you could, and should pump most of your profits into making things faster, better and/or cheaper. It’s like plugging a MacBook Air into a vintage IBM Mainframe. Getting them to talk to each other is a miracle, wastes the power of one, and taxes the power of the other. [3] However, it’s to the benefit of those shareholders for Google to bend to the rules of this old system, and since one of those shareholders is Larry Page, and he sets the priorities. If your personal bottom line and career depended on keeping that stock price going up, you’d make some of the same decisions, too.

Those decisions are coming at the cost of us Google users. We used to be able to trust Google, because Google put us first. Ads were the necessary tradeoff, and we accepted them in the same way we accept ads on television, radio, magazines, and newspapers. [4] Perhaps not all of that trust was earned, but for a good while, it looked like “Don’t be evil.” was more than just a slogan. Even now, I hesitate to call Google’s actions evil. They are perfectly reasonable actions based on a set of priorities that I find to be misplaced. I’ll work with them, and I’ll acknowledge a good product when they have one, but I doubt I’ll ever be putting my full trust in Google again.

Not long after the fiasco of the Google Reader shutdown announcement, I signed up for a premium account with Newsblur, and promptly went back to Reeder and Mr. Reader with their Google Reader sync. This was purely because of Newsblur’s growing pains from the waves of Google Reader exiles crossing the border. Now that the worst is over, and Newsblur is up and running at almost full-steam, I feel like I can give it a proper chance, and I like a lot of what I’ve seen so far.

In my brief time with the service, it’s very clear that Newsblur is not Google Reader. This is good, and this is bad, but it’s mostly neutral. Different services are different, and Newsblur doesn’t have the same UI, shortcuts, or third-party app “support” as Reader does. Did. It is, however, an easy jump from Google Reader to Newsblur. You don’t even need to use Google Takeout to get your subscriptions. Newsblur uses some API magic to pull not only your feeds, but even starred items. [1] This feature almost certainly won’t work after July 1st, so if NewsBlur is something you’re considering making the jump to, get on it quick.

The web app is a little homely, especially coming from apps like Reeder for Mac, or even the Google Reader web interface. Still, it works well enough, and has some intuitive keyboard shortcuts. There’s also a great feed checker tool built in to the app, and I was able to correct, or delete, broken feeds with only a couple of clicks. Feed management is a little less seamless—I expected to be able to drag and drop to move feeds around, but organizing everything is done it contextual menus, and you can’t create a folder from the move feeds menu. Small issues, both. The site itself is fast, though the user onslaught has forced Samuel to reduce the amount of times per day the service actually fetches new articles. I haven’t noticed this to be a problem, but if you want up-to-the-minute information, it’s something to be aware of.

The worst part is the iOS app. It’s perfectly serviceable, but in the age of Reeder, Mr. Reeder, and other gorgeous, easy-to-use RSS apps for iOS, NewsBlur’s feels like a step back to 2009. It works, but it’s neither as fun, or as pretty as the Google Reader based apps. NewsBlur does, however, have an API, and I hope that the developers of my preferred RSS apps will add support for NewsBlur soon. For now, I will make do. Any native app is better than none. Speaking of which, there’s also a helper app for the Mac to allow Safari to open RSS feeds directly in the NewsBlur web app, though with RSS settings removed in Safari 6, setting it up is a minor pain. [2]

The two best things about NewsBlur, however, are that it’s an independent, paid service, and actively developed. These fill me with the confidence that NewsBlur is not going to go away, and that I can use the site without having to surrender anything more than $24 a year. Truth is, if I didn’t have to leave Google Reader, I wouldn’t, but my forced exile from Google’s garden has ended up with me in a comfortable place with a benevolent caretaker. If you’re still looking for a place to go, give it a try.