LaunchBar 5.5 Update

My launcher of choice - LaunchBar - just received a really nice update. It’s now v5.5.

This version brings support for text snippets, a finely tuned integration with Automator workflows, better iTunes support and many more features to the table.

Workflows

LaunchBar now provides tight integration with Automator workflows, allowing you to run them from within LaunchBar, optionally pass text or file arguments, and to return the results back to LaunchBar.

Various Automator actions for getting workflow results back to LaunchBar and for accessing LaunchBar features from within your workflows.

You can read the complete release notes here.

I’m a longtime LaunchBar user and a fan. I tried Alfred, but somehow I always just felt more at home with LaunchBar. To be honest, I haven’t really sat down and gave Alfred 2 a fair chance because the dynamic duo I have with LaunchBar and Keyboard Maestro is all I could wish for.

With Keyboard Maestro I don’t have to remember what to type. I fire up one of my global palettes and can read from there on what I want to trigger next.

LaunchBar is the perfect companion app for me. I like that it just displays a small window at the top and I’m a frequent user of the folder navigation that comes with a fuzzy search algorithm. If I drill down a folder structure and type “12” it finds all files with “12” in it and not only the ones that start with this number. I never got it why I have to use a wildcard in Alfred to achieve the same thing. That’s one of the few tiny extra steps that make using Alfred permanently hard for me.¹