Review Of Chosr, A “Quicksilver” Startpage

This was news to me. I stumbled across this article about Chosr, a web based command like interface that works just like Quicksilver. (Read more about Quicksilver here.) The idea is that as soon as you open a new tab in your browser, the startpage (Chosr) appears and lets you type in what you want to do next. This alleviates the problem of always changing input medium (keyboard/mouse), and you can do more just using the keyboard.

Let’s take an example. You are watching the election closely, and want to see his latest ad that aired on several TV stations yesterday. Normally you would open a new tab, move your cursor to the address field, click, type in “youtube.com”, wait for it to load, move your cursor to the search field, type in “obama ad”, press enter and wait for the search results, click your preferred video, wait for it to load, then watch it. (I’m fully aware that there are several other ways to speed up this process, I’m using search keywords myself, for instance.)

If you were using Chosr though, you would do the following. Open up a new tab, type in “obama ad”, tab to the next box, type youtube, hit enter to load the list of results, then enter again to play the video. A much faster process, just because you don’t have to go back and forth from the keyboard and the mouse.

You don’t even have to sign up to give it a test run. Just go to www.chosr.com and take it for a spin! They also have a bunch of tremendous videos that teach you about the possibilities of the startpage interface.

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