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by _chendo_
2117 days ago
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Glad you loved the concept! Unfortunately I've been rather busy the last couple of years and haven't had the capacity to work on Shortcat, and coupled with not being amazing at Obj-C/Swift/Cocoa (my major contributions are FuzzyAutocomplete and the initial POC for Semantic History in iTerm2), being frustrated with building UIs on Mac (mostly build web stuff). There's also the problem that Accessibility APIs aren't well-documented and isn't commonly used, and applications not implementing Accessibility correctly (and potentially causing crashes in Shortcat, or making the target application hang), which was super tough to deal with as a solo dev. I did have a crack at bringing the Swift-based prototype up to date with Swift 5 on the weekend, and am investigating the feasibility of using SwiftUI which would help me on the UI front! Ideally I'd find another dev to work on Shortcat (rev-share or otherwise), and consider a more sustainable pricing model. I think tools that depend on Accessibility APIs that are used by people who don't normally depend on Accessibility APIs can force developers to improve their AX implementation so people who do depend on good Accessibility to use applications can benefit. It makes me happy to hear that it was good enough for you to buy another copy! How did you discover Shortcat in the first place? |
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But the main thing is that Shortcat was simply the thing that I always thought should have been baked into operating systems since the idea of “search to execute” became a thing. Mostly these days I rely on Command-Shift-/ (Menubar search), but that is a poor poor substitute. Shortcat really shines in dynamic context selection, like when trying to navigate something like Outlook for Mac, where you don’t know the shortcuts and don’t care to use them, and anyway just want to select the email that contains the text you’ve already started reading. Or things like the preference menus where navigating the combination of tabs and sidebars can be especially unclear from a keyboard perspective.