Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
QuicKeys : Backintheday(thatis,before2010orso),QuicKeyswasthebiggest,
baddest, most powerful macro tool for Macs. I absolutely loved it—I found it
both easier to use and more flexible than the Keyboard Maestro of that era,
and was hard-pressed tocome upwith any automation task itcouldn't perform.
Unfortunately, the company that owns it, Startly Technologies, encountered a
series of misfortunes—not the least of which was the unexpected death of the
lead QuicKeys developer. As a result, QuicKeys has been in a state of suspended
animation.
The software hasn't been updated since December 17, 2009. For reference,
those were the days of 10.6 Snow Leopard; 10.7 Lion came out in July 2011.
Although QuicKeys is still for sale and still sort of, mostly works with Mavericks
(see extra steps required here), it doesn't take advantage of any recently added
OSXtechnologies,andhasnontrivialbugs.SinceitwasneverupdatedforLion,
Mountain Lion, or Mavericks, I have to assume the current version (4.0.7) is
the last one we'll ever see. It may work (sort of, mostly) for a long time or it may
break with 10.10 Yosemite, but despite its power, I can't feel good about relying
on an app that's barely on life support. If the app should come back to life, I'll
be more than happy to update this section of the topic accordingly!
Alfred : Alfred, which I discussed in Use a Third-party Launcher , has a feature
called workflows that's available only if you purchase the optional Powerpack.
Workflows connect a trigger (such as pressing Alfred's hot key) and/or an input
(such as a keyword or a filter) with an action (such as opening a file or URL,
or running a shell script or AppleScript) and an optional output (such as a
notification or putting something on the clipboard). So, in a limited sense,
those sequences of actions are macro-like. But any logic they contain comes
only from the embedded script(s), so Alfred's main contribution is a way to
trigger that behavior.
That's not to say Alfred workflows aren't extremely useful—they are. With a
few keystrokes in Alfred, you can create a new note or search in Evernote,
perform a search on multiple Web sites at once, or open a selected image in a
browser instead of Preview. But Alfred workflows are much more limited than
Automator workflows, and more limited still than Keyboard Maestro macros.
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