I’m going to try something new. And it’s so far outside my wheelhouse and what I would normally be comfortable with that the only reason I’m doing this is due to encouragement from my wife and the assurances of a few friends who swear it’s not a completely insane and arrogant idea.
I’m filled with rage and despair and also just sad thinking about what we in the tech industry unintentionally unleashed upon the world – and then willfully made worse through greed and arrogance. This is my small contribution to make things better. It likely won’t matter. But it does give me some relief to have done something. Anything.
I live and die by my keyboard. And here are the shortcuts I couldn’t do without. (Maybe this post should have been titled “A Love Letter to KeybaordMaestro”.)
Maybe the documentation has disappeared online, or maybe it was only ever available via word-of-mouth fifteen years ago, but I lost about four hours the other night trying to figure out how to make the dropdown choices in my `NSPredicateEditor` show user-friendly names instead their actual key paths.
So, I did what I almost always do when I face a situation of deep despair on my Mac. I reached for the greatest Swiss Army knife of them all – Keyboard Maestro – and came up with an incredibly lo-fi solution that isn’t as feature rich as what those other apps offer or as convenient as Dock folders (when they don’t disappear), but it works for me!
As apps deviate further and further away from the HIG with custom UI, whether for design reasons or in the pursuit of a mythical, cross-platform code base that management thinks will cost less, we lose the benefits of a well reasoned platform that was formerly easy to work with and a joy to use.
…I’m just glad I’m to the point in my nerd existence where I can be happy applying a fix and not caring about the real underlying issues that don’t concern me.