AppFlow

Cockpit Icon

Cockpit is the latest works to come out of the factory of Green and Slimy.  Cockpit was built with the simple and sole purpose of making it quicker to navigate through applications on your Mac, weather browsing the net with Safari or playing music with iTunes.

Cockpit is a simple application thats sits in the system tray until wanted, it is a small, lightweight and fast way to control basic functions on your Mac, such as changing music volume or skipping a track.

What does it feature?

Cockpit features basic support for several Mac OS X applications: iTunes, Safari, iCal, Mail, iPhoto and Keynote.  On top of this it allows you to control the Mac OS X operating system itself.  As shown by the screenshots below the application sports a very compact window, with the advantage that this makes it very quick and easy to find what you are after, the downside is the it is limited on functionality.

On the other hand the lack of button space does not hold Cockpit back, instead the authors have implemented system-wide keyboard control, meaning that you can quickly send a command to any application on your Mac by putting Cockpits keyboard controls to use.

iTunes Control

Safari Control

iCal Control

Mail Control

Keynote Control

iPhoto Control

System Control

As can be seen from the screenshots above Cockpit offers an extensive range of control for such a small application, but does have another trick up it’s sleeve as well.  This will not be of much use to you unless, like me you use multiple displays, but I think it is still worth a mention.  Cockpit has the ability to be dragged out of it’s position sat in the system tray, and to, instead, float on top of all other windows anywhere on the screen in a translucent mode until you hover over the application at which point it comes back into focus, hiding everything behind it.

Cockpit sat on my Desktop

Expandability

An application such as Cockpit would be lost without a means to expand, and the developers have not missed out here at all.  Within the system preferences for Cockpit the developers have added functionality for users to easily create their own add-ons, complete with the means to export the plugin to give to others or submit to the Green and Slimy website to make it easy for other to install the add-on you created.

Plugin Screen

Developing Your Own Plugin

Conclusion

Cockpit makes sense to me, it makes it quick and easy for you to create a new,faster, way to navigate through applications as well as to take control of them, but their is one small fault that I cannot help but ignore when using Cockpit.

Cockpit will open iTunes on boot-up, not a problem in itself but upon closing iTunes it will simply open it again.  For me this causes hell, I store all of my music on an external hard drive, and when it’s not connected I turn on my MacBook, Cockpit launches which in turn launches iTunes which will then proceed to move my library media folder.  Thanks Cockpit.

This also creates an issues when ejecting my external hard drive, if iTunes is open I cannot eject it as iTunes is accessing it, even when nothing is being played.  So, to get around this I cannot just close iTunes because Cockpit will open it again.  I have to close Cockpit, then close iTunes and then eject my external hard drive.  Ohh, and then Cockpit needs to be launched again if I want to carry on using it.

So, be warned their is this small but extremely irritating bug with Cockpit, which renders it pretty much useless to me, but when this is fixed I will happily use Cockpit.  The guys over at Green and Slimy have hit the nail on the head for fast application navigation, I just need to see this one bug fixed.