Houdahspot and Quicksilver

[pendolino]

i was asking the houdahspot developer about QS plugins to which he
replied:

"Please refer to the Help documentation for instructions for
integration with LaunchBar. HoudahSpot offers both a custom URL scheme
and AppleScript access to BlitzSearch. I am guessing that one of those
methods should work with QuickSilver."

I then checked there and found the following in the help for
Houdahspot:

"HoudahSpot gives access to the BlitzSearch feature by implementing a
custom URL scheme. You may set up a LaunchBar search template to call
into this URL scheme. The search string should be:

hhspot://blitzSearch?searchString=*&filenameFlag=YES&contentFlag=YES&commentsFlag=YES

An additional parameter, “templatename” makes it possible to specify
the name of a template to use.

You may use other tools to call into this mechanism. The popular
Safari plug-in Saft comes to mind.

AppleScript support

The BlitzSearch feature may also be called upon using AppleScript.

For use with LaunchBar, you would use the following script:

on handle_string(theString)
tell application "HoudahSpot"
blitzSearch theString filename yes content yes
comments yes
end tell
end handle_string

You may find other launchers, like Butler and QuickSilver, to be able
to call Apple Scripts."

the Custom URL format work quite nicely based on my limited initial
testing so far but I thought i would highlight this for other QS users
that may be using the excellent Houdahspot app. the developer is quite
responsive and deserves my dollars for that alone but the fact that he
continuously keeps improving this applications is brilliant.

[pendolino]

i just did some more testing with the above and found the following:

* the custom URL searches for houdahspot work quite nicely with QS
using the 'web search module' that most people already have enabled
and use as far as i have seen.
* you need to replace the searchstring variable (shown as *) with ***
(QS default string variable) and then you can pull up a search with QS
and enter the words/phrases you are looking for.
* an example of the one i used is: "hhspot://blitzSearch?
searchString=***&filenameFlag=YES&contentFlag=NO&commentsFlag=YES",
tab to second pane and choose 'search for' and then tab again and
enter the text/phrase you are looking for. this example will omit
searching the files contents as you can see from the flag settings.
* i can't save these strings in Delicious.com likely because they
begin with hhspot. too bad because i had been using the 'social
bookmark module' to pull up my QS websearches from delicious instead
of storing them in Quicksilver's catalog and this created a more
robust repository that didn't get lost or corrupted when switching
machines or messing around with QS
* Houdahspot just became much more useful!

good luck for any of those using it and let us know how it works.