LaunchBar is the first tool I install on a new Mac. I like it so much, I wrote a book about it: Take Control of LaunchBar.
As I say in my book:
“I’ve been using LaunchBar for nearly as long as it has been around on the Mac. It’s the first utility that I install on every new Mac; with LaunchBar installed, I can get on with everything else I need to do.”
In this book, I outline LaunchBar’s five superpowers: Abbreviation Search, Browsing, Sub-search, Send To and Instant Send.
Today, Objective Development has released LaunchBar 6.1, and, with it, a sixth superpower: the Staging Area.
As Objective Development points out, “Staging is a technique that allows you to create multiple selections in LaunchBar and to act on all of these items at once.” Instead of just acting on a single file in LaunchBar, you can select multiple items from any location. And then you can do things like:
- Select multiple files and send them via email.
- Or archive them into a ZIP file.
- Or move them to the Trash.
- Select a couple of songs or albums and play them in iTunes.
- Select a series of emoji, and insert all of them in one go.
- Send one or more files to multiple email recipients.
- Launch a bunch of apps at once.
- Open a number of web bookmarks.
- Perform a web search on multiple search engines simultaneously.
- And more.
Here’s an example. I’ve used LaunchBar to search in my iTunes library, finding a few Miles Davis songs I want to listen to. They’re each in different locations, and searching in iTunes would have taken a lot longer. Here, I just sub-searched all my Miles Davis songs; each time I found one I wanted, I pressed Shift-Down-arrow to add them to the staging area. I then pressed Shift-Right-arrow to view the staging area’s contents:
I can now press Return, and send these items to iTunes, which will add them to my LaunchBar playlist.
But, as you can see in the list above, there’s so much more you can do. Grab the latest update to LaunchBar – if you already use LaunchBar, invoke the bar (most often this is by pressing Command-Space), click on the rightmost part of the bar to view the LaunchBar menu and choose Check for Updates.
If you haven’t yet used LaunchBar, grab a 30-day demo from the LaunchBar web page.
And to learn more, check out my Take Control of LaunchBar.
If you already have a copy of the book, the update for LaunchBar 6 is just about finished. We were waiting for the release of LaunchBar 6.1 to be able to finalize it.