Recently, I’ve chatted with a few folks that also use Tasks Pro™/Tasks and LaunchBar as part of their toolset. I have a number of Tasks Pro™ shortcuts I use with LaunchBar, some of which the others weren’t aware were possible.

First the obvious ones:

• Bookmark for creating a new task (LaunchBar shortcut: nt)
• Bookmark for creating a new note (LaunchBar shortcut: nn)
• Bookmark for creating a new task with a specified parent (LaunchBar shortcut: ndt – new task under ‘Daily’ parent task)

Now some of the less obvious ones:

• Search Template for doing a quick search (LaunchBar shortcut: ts)

  I put this on the Extra Goodies page. You can also specify other search criteria in the base URL. For example, you could restrict the search to be under a certain task, etc.

• Creating a new task using a Search Template (LaunchBar shortcut: ntt)

  The Search Template functionality in LaunchBar basically allows you to add to a URL in a single place, but the information you enter doesn’t have to be search related. I use a Search Template to be able to quickly enter new tasks and enter the title of the task right into the Search Template field in LaunchBar. The URL for the Search Template should look something like this:

  http://example.com/tasks/index.php?
screen=edit&task_title=*

• Create a task from a template (I don’t use this, but others have asked)

  It’s a little less straightforward to bookmark the URL for creating a task from a template, but it isn’t hard. Right-click on the link to deploy a task and select ‘Copy Link Location’. Then pull the ‘index.php…’ part from the URL and add your full domain (http://www.example…) in front of it in your bookmark.

I’m sure you can do the same thing in Quicksilver (please no religious arguments re: QS and LB, use whichever you like best). Unfortunately, AppRocket doesn’t seem to support the creation of new search templates and the e-mails I’ve sent to them on the subject have been ignored (or at least not replied to).

Hope this is useful. And for anyone not using LaunchBar, Quicksilver or AppRocket – do yourself an favor and try one out.

This post is part of the project: Tasks Pro™. View the project timeline for more context on this post.