Automation programs that can add speed, precision, and utility to your daily life
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."
- Lewis Carroll
Perfecting the relationship between form and function is no easy thing for a software developer
Last week in TidBITS-347, the first part of this article described CE Software's QuicKeys (QK) and mentioned a new feature of the recent 3.5 release: toolbar triggers
Late last year, WestCode Software introduced OneClick, their answer to the need for a flexible, easy-to-use, comprehensive, highly customizable utility program
Those wishing to automate their Macs without spending the money or yielding the RAM required to run one of the big commercial macro programs may wish to consider KeyQuencer
TidBITS not long ago discussed three macro programs: QuicKeys (beginning in TidBITS-347), OneClick (in TidBITS-350), and KeyQuencer (in TidBITS-351.) Consideration of these has led me to some reflections on the state of the Mac
Back in 1988, when Microsoft Word couldn't search and replace styles, a Classics student of mine named Adam Engst (what ever became of him?) put me wise to a solution involving macro automation, using CE Software's QuicKeys
In the struggle to return control of the computer to the user, macro utilities are indispensable. Such a utility acts as a ghostly simulacrum of a live user, choosing from menus, typing keys, and clicking the mouse; an assemblage of such actions can essentially script the unscriptable, driving any application to customize or automate frequent or repetitive tasks
With the advent of Mac OS X 10.1, I'm using Mac OS X nearly all the time, but many of my long-standing work habits have become useless. That's because those habits rely on third-party utilities that haven't made the transition - and, one fears, may never do so
This is the tale of a U.S. government statute, a certain Cupertino-based computer company, and a small revolution taking place quietly on your computer, if you use Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar.
To understand this revolution, you need to know what a macro program is