Thursday, December 22, 2011

Help Finish QuicKeys 4 for Lion

The lead programmer for QuicKeys has sadly died, and Startly is seeking someone to replace him and complete the update for Lion (via Chucky). I used to be a heavy user of QuicKeys. Here’s a review from 1997 in which I complain about the nested dialogs and menus in its interface, and the fact that it used 600K of RAM.

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"Here’s a review from 1997 in which I complain about the nested dialogs and menus in its interface..."

The QuicKeys UI has really improved since '97. It's quite elegant these days.

(Of course, back in the pre-OS X days, I preferred OneClick. Best. Automation. Software. Ever.)

The UI is much better now. I switched to it from iKey. Most things work under Lion. The big thing that doesn't is recordability. Hope they find someone to take it over.

@Chucky Yes, as I recall OneClick was the best when it was capable of handling what you needed to do. QuicKeys and other utilities were less elegant but had more features.

I so miss OneClick as well; the way you could develop real UIs in it was pretty incredible, and I'm not aware of anything similar on OS X. One of the coolest uses of it was embedded as the navigation UI of Quicken. (For those who don't remember, for a few years Quicken was not only an acceptable but an extraordinary Mac app; it also had one of the best Apple Guide implementations I've ever seen. What a long way it's fallen.)

"I so miss OneClick as well; the way you could develop real UIs in it was pretty incredible, and I'm not aware of anything similar on OS X."

I don't use the phrase "Best. Automation. Software. Ever" lightly. You could mold it like Play-Doh to do anything you could imagine.

And the scripting language was absolutely brilliant. They didn't call it "EasyScript" for nothing.

I'm a scripter, not a coder. I've never been able to learn anything much harder than BASIC, Microsoft's various version of WordBasic, or AppleScript. But the OneClick language was better than any of them. It really made it easy to think in GUI terms and get stuff to work.

"One of the coolest uses of it was embedded as the navigation UI of Quicken."

Yup. That's how easy it was. Quicken thought it was easier to slap on OneClick than write normal app functionality.

"@Chucky Yes, as I recall OneClick was the best when it was capable of handling what you needed to do."

My recollection is that it had essentially zero limits in terms of functionality, once you learned its simple scripting language.

"Most things work under Lion. The big thing that doesn't is recordability."

I don't do Lion, but I've also heard that most things work. I think there are also issues with the palette functionality.

"Hope they find someone to take it over."

As do I. I think it's best of breed software for its category.

And despite the sadness of the passing of a talented OS X coder, the news is actually hopeful from the standpoint of the user. I'd been assuming that it wasn't getting updated because Startly didn't see commercial prospects for life outside the New Model app store. But the fact that they want to spend money on the product means my assumption was wrong.

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