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LaunchBar 6.1

Up until now, Objective Development’s LaunchBar has relied on five superpowers — Abbreviation Search, Browsing, Sub-search, Send To, and Instant Send — to help you carry out tasks on your Mac more efficiently. But with the release of version 6.1, LaunchBar gains a sixth superpower called Staging, which enables you to select multiple items and work on them all at once. Objective Development’s blog post introducing Staging includes several examples (such as selecting multiple files and attaching them to an email message, or opening a Web search in multiple search engines), the basics of creating multiple selections in the
staging area, and a list of keyboard shortcuts. (Kirk McElhearn will cover Staging in depth in the next version of “Take Control of LaunchBar.”)

The keyboard-based launcher also improves the flexibility of adding calendar items (accepting description, location and date/time in arbitrary order, though still requiring the location to come after the description). Additionally, LaunchBar 6.1 improves the Zip archive compression action to support multiple selections, permanently displays contact labels while browsing, adds support for LaunchBar Actions implemented as Automator workflows, improves the Move to Trash action with undo capability, adds support for Tower 2 repository bookmark indexing and browsing, and changes the shortcuts for Info Browsing and Show Siblings for better consistency with Staging. ($29 new with a 20 percent discount for TidBITS members, free update, 10.0 MB, release notes, 10.9+)

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