Proxi Blog

Aja Bogdanoff wrote me yesterday and had these nice things to say about Proxi:

I’m an animation student who’s also teaching Maya training classes on the side, and I’ve gotten tired of having to constantly tell people “Now I’m hitting the F key. Now I’m hitting the Command key. That was the Space bar.” and I’m sure my students are sick of it, too. Today my husband, who’s a big fan of Proxi, suggested that I use it to display what key I was pressing and what that key does as I work, without having to think about it or explain it or anything. And I LOVE it! It’s totally going to change the way I teach the intro “here’s what all the controls do” class.

…

As I was telling Mark (the husband), the coolest part of this is that we went from saying, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if….” to having a totally functional and nearly perfect tool in about an hour. And it has almost all the features we could possibly want in it… totally customizable text, placement, colors, opacity… we’ll be able to add images when we get to that point… it’s really pretty remarkable.

So this is really cool. It’s great to see people using Proxi to come up with creative solutions to everyday problems. Aja and Mark even made a little movie to demonstrate her technique. You can watch it here.

Thanks Aja and Mark!

Good stuff from Brent Simmons, developer of NetNewsWire: How to manipulate me (or, Tuesday Whipper-Snapping)

And more good stuff from the guys at Rogue Amoeba developers of fine apps such as Audio Hijack Pro and Airfoil: Pistols At Dawn or How Not To Request A Feature

An AirClick software user wrote me last night asking for some advice in customizing his software for a particular purpose and while I responded, I considered how to do accomplish the same thing in iNotify. Some of it would be easier given that you don’t have to muck around with plist files and such, but it also occurred to me that something very basic is missing from iNotify that would make it difficult to duplicate the functionality built in to the current AirClick software: saved variables.

The current AirClick software lets you set and test variables and conditionally execute a command based on the state of this variable. iNotify has the testing portion of this down by way of filters. But we don’t yet have the ability to store a variable conveniently. You could replicate AirClick’s functionality by writing something out to a file and filtering based on the contents of the file, but that seems icky. So, I’ll be adding a task that lets you save a persistent variable. We’ll place these values in the app’s preference file so they will live through a restart. Perhaps there will be more use to these variables than just testing to see if a switch was held for a long time or not.

All this leads me to the real topic I need to discuss, and that is complexity. The idea is to create and application that is both powerful and easy to ease. For simple tasks I want configuration to be a breeze. I don’t want the number of options available to overwhelm a user. But I don’t want to hamstring a power user by hiding the powerful options so it’s difficult for them. So please if you have any suggestions to help accomplish these aims let me know. In particular if something could be named better, described better or presented better, I want to hear about it!

I’ll be trying to wrap up v0.03 later today, more on that when the release comes.