Published on Nov. 3, 2006
Ian keeps bugging me at how great Quicksilver is. Knowning that there must be an alternative built for linux, I accidently stumbled across Katapult.
While it still has a little room to grow, Katapult makes a great tool in any KDE toolchest. Press ALT+SPACE, and your widget fires up, ready to take your orders. Since words don't really do this justice, I created a screencast.
Tagged As: Screencasts
11 a.m.
3:23 a.m.
Thanks for leaving a comment! Indeed, I did forget to mention that Katapult does tab-completion -- I guess I'm pretty used to using tab a-lot.
I'll look into the text area issue -- thanks for taking the time to point it out!
2:20 p.m.
Hmmm.. Nice. I'm looking into switvhing from OSX back to Ubuntu and I have to admit that Quicksilver is one of the things that has me hooked so I'm very happy to see this.
Just out of curiosity, what did you use to create the screencast video and audio ? This came up at work the other day (screencast tech for Linux) and I have to admit I was at a loss to answer about good ones.
ciao !
D.
11:45 p.m.
Daryl:
Yes, I've heard from many Mac-heads that Quicksilver is their fav app. I guess you could try Katapult out. I think KDE4 is going to be pretty slick.
As for the screencast, I've done them several ways. One way is to use VMWare Workstation and capture it as a movie, then convert it using ffmpeg.
This screenshot was done using screenKast with a VNC session on the same computer (I just setup a special "screencast" user). It works quite well. There are some other apps that will capture VNC sessions, and work decently.
You could also use an app called Istanbul, it allows you to capture what is currently on your screen -- but I found it a little buggy, and the VNC route works fine for me.
Audio was done with Audacity, and ffmpeg was used to mix the two.
I did this on my crappy T23 laptop, so none of the above is too resource intensive. Cheers!
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About this page
This entry is from my tech blog and was written on Nov. 3, 2006. It's been tagged with Screencasts. There have been 4 comments so far.
Thanks for the 'cast! you didn't mention that only the first few characters of an app name are required for Katapult to recognize and launch it. I hope that katapult and launchy (win) can catch up to quicksilver.
One note on the comment box, in firefox 2.0.0.2 win the text area extends to the right beind the mainContent div (so I can't see everything I've typed).