First, this is a silly ad hominem criticism; their arguments have little to do with their Enso application. But either way, these humanized guys are in general on top of things, and their thoughts about interface design are usually quite insightful. Implementing good interfaces, and insightfully criticizing interfaces, are two very different skills.

Second, while I personally love Quicksilver, it has a significant learning curve. Enso's model is, for better or worse, rather simpler. And beyond that, experimentation is good. A direct clone of Quicksilver would be both out of place on windows, and also much less interesting to create than a new application, with its own ideas.

Third, what the hell is Launchy?

And, hey, what's with "a direct clone of Quicksilver would be out of place on Windows"? No it wouldn't. It would be more appropriate. Quicksilver on the Mac competes with a lot of well-thought-out workflow that already exists in the OS X interface. Quicksilver on Windows would add far more value. And the QS "search-and-act" idiom is universal.

Have you used Quicksilver? You should. It's pretty amazing.

When people say, "I wish Windows had something like Quicksilver," Launchy is usually what gets brought up in response. http://www.launchy.net/

It's not an ad-hominem when someone publishes a critique of X, and you allege that they haven't demonstrated that they are qualified to critique X.

In this case, it might be WRONG to allege that. But it's not an ad-hominem.

Arguments about the topic matter. Qualifications of the people don't.

If what you have to say about neurosurgery makes sense, what's the problem?

Ow. That's harsh. They also did http://www.songza.com/ , which I think is pretty elegant.

Here's the response to the Quicksilver Clone accusations: http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/11/01/enso-quicksilver-for-...

At the end of the day, these guys are pretty sharp about UI, IMO-- whether they cloned something or not.

Enso seemed to just show a lot of idiosyncratic ideas about how UI design "should" be. The idea that the user should type some extra command, or hold down some extra key -- that's all crap. I'm a loyal Quicksilver user who bought into their arguments and tried using Enso at work on WinXP for a few weeks, and Quicksilver beats Enso hands down. Quicksilver just works and is friendly, whereas Enso tries to convert you to their quirky UI cult.

I like the idea behind Enso's "commands", but why the hell make it mandatory? Make the default action what the user expects by default, and allow the user to override it in exceptional cases -- a la Quicksilver!

I was being deliberately rude and snarky about Humanized, who, let it be said, can choose contrasting color saturations with the greatest of ease, and can "collect user interface evidence" circles around my command-line ass.

But I agree, I think their attempt to position Enso versus Quicksilver is weak. If Quicksilver was ported to Windows, nobody would use Enso; the marginal cost of that particular value prop for Windows users is already zero, and Quicksilver's "search-and-act" idiom is just more sophisticated, and makes a greater contribution to UI design, than does Enso's. Sorry, command completion? Not revolutionary.