Don’t we all just love undocumented goodness? Some people spend a lot of time exploring and experimenting with APIs and functions to see what they can accomplish. I get a fair amount of email of people asking how exactly these private, undocumented goodies are discovered. You only need two things. The appropriate tools, and lots of spare time.

Quicksilver is a ubiquitous application. Everyone knows about it, and most people use it to bolster their productivity. The application is able to catalog portions of your hard drive to give you instant access to your documents and software. Various plugins extend Quicksilver’s functionality and add more actions (such as calculations, dictionary lookups or scaling images) as well as allow it to index a wider range of files. This system is so powerful, that in two keystrokes it is possible to locate almost any file buried in your hard drive, and two more to perform an action on it such as deleting, renaming, etc. However, due to limited documentation and the application only being a Beta release, writing a plugin remains a mystery to most developers. This article aims to illustrate the steps needed in order to write a working Quicksilver plugin in Xcode and Objective-C. (Python programmers may use PyObjC).