Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Wireless Network Trigger:
You can trigger a macro by connecting to, or
disconnecting from, a certain Wi-Fi network.
Every Minute Counts
I'd like to wrap up this section on Keyboard Maestro by going back to a story I mentioned in
the
Introduction
.
For years, I've kept track of my income as a freelance author on a daily basis—it's the only
way I can stay on top of my budget given the ups and downs of the publishing business.
It used to be that every single day, I'd check to see how many copies of each of my Take
Control topics I'd sold the previous day (by counting email receipts). Then I'd check that
day's earnings from Google AdSense and Amazon affiliate links on my Web sites. Finally, I'd
enter all this information into a spreadsheet.
That whole process took me about 5 minutes a day, and I couldn't stand it. After doing
this hundreds of times, I finally got fed up and decided I'd figure out once and for all how
to automate it. I spent a full day creating an elaborate Keyboard Maestro macro that, in
combination with some AppleScript code I'd previously written, did all that for me—all on a
recurring schedule, so it now requires zero clicks, zero keystrokes, and zero minutes. I now
get to save 5 minutes a day—or 30 hours a year—and I cherish every moment of it.
Use Another Macro Utility
Keyboard Maestro isn't the only macro utility for OS X, but it's an excellent one—and it's the
only one (as far as I can tell) that's receiving active development attention. But, because I
know people will ask, I do want to say a few words about other Mac macro utilities:
•
iKey
: Although not in the same league as Keyboard Maestro, iKey is a fine little
macro utility. It has a reasonably thorough list of triggers and actions, and can
dispatch many repetitive tasks with ease. (And, it has Take Control cred: Adam
Engst wrote
Take Control of iKey 2
,
which is slightly outdated, but still useful.)
iKey doesn't include logic, as such. For example, it can wait for certain app
or window states before moving on with the next step in a macro, but it can't
make if/then/else decisions, process variables, perform loops, search for text
patterns, or evaluate complex conditions as Keyboard Maestro can. And its
interface is odd—it strikes me as being backwards from the way most macro
utilities approach triggers and actions. As I write this, iKey's last update was on
October 31, 2011, which is a long time in Internet years. Although it works (with
abitofcoaxing)underMavericks,itdoesn'tappeartobeinactivedevelopment,
which makes me reluctant to recommend it.
