TechnoBlog - Hotkeys.
I am one of
those guys that tries to actually
only use the software that I have
obtained legally. Even among
software developers, that is
considered freaky, I have come to
experienced. Yet, to me it does not
make sense to do anything else.
Which is not to say I do not always
like what I buy.
One of the more stupid software
applications I have paid for was
Synergy. It cost about 5 dollars so
it was not a big loss, but it ended
up being useful for only one thing:
controlling iTunes via hotkeys.
This has always been troublesome
for me, I am a keyboard user not a
mouse user, so I really wanted to
be able to hit that function button
whenever somebody would interrupt
me while I am listening to music.
That is often, and usually iTunes
is not visible, let alone in front
of my sight with the play/pause
button under my mouse cursor. So,
hitting that function key is what I
needed synergy for. That is a bit
of a stupid task, for just one
program.
These days it seems you have every
application expanding it's
functionality with HotKeys. Maybe
Apple will make all that
functionality obsolete by finally
making that customization in the
Keyboard & Mouse panel of the
System Preferences actually work.
Has anybody ever been able to use
this for anything else than the
predefined shortcuts in there?
No, I don't like it when I have to
wait for every application
developer to put the hotkey
functionality where I want it or
need it. Apple has conveniently put
special keys on every keyboard for
louder and quieter music, for eject
and for brighter and darker screen,
but they have decided for me that I
did not need a play/pause button.
Being a developer and open source
enthousiast, I can not live with
that. Being a UNIXy kind of guy, I
want a tool that can do anything
for me.
Googling for some code, I found a
guy called Nathan Day who had
implemented a framework for hotkeys
and had even written a nice testing
application with it. It was
licensed conveniently so I could
hack into the code and throw away
all I did not need to put in the
one thing I do need: trigger
arbitrary user chosen scripts on a
user defined hotkey. Yes!
Now I can make my hotkeys fancy as
I want. I can play/pause iTunes by
using AppleScript, easy! There goes
Synergy. Using this little
application I can do arbitrarily
complicated things just using one
hotkey. Actually, what I will do
next is write up a little script
that appends the current playing
time of the track playing in iTunes
to a logfile somewhere so that I
can later split the track using
mp3split and organize those radio
shows the way I always wanted them.
Damn, my life will be so much
better!
[ doing
hotkeys in Cocoa ]
[ nathan
day's home page ]
[ The
App as it is ]
