Tag Archives: shortcut

March 19, 2013, 8:00 am

Turn Your iPad into a Universal Shortcut Machine with Actions

If you’ve been reading my last several posts, you might have figured out that I’m kind of fanatical about keyboard shortcuts. That’s why I recently showed you how to learn your keyboard shortcuts, brainstormed new and simple twists on text expansion, and covered how to create keyboard shortcuts for ANYTHING! It turns out that my love of shortcuts isn’t restricted to the keyboard, however. Launch Center Pro is my most used app on my phone, because it lets me do everything on my iOS device with a single touch. So when I heard about a new iPad app that would let me fire off shortcuts to the computer, I was more than a little curious.

Actions bills itself as the One App to Rule Them All. But that title is a bit misleading, as it might make you think that it will control the apps on the iPad itself. Instead, Actions controls the applications on your computer. (Apple fanboy status be damned, …

February 26, 2013, 11:00 am

Launch Center Pro, or Get to Everything on Your iOS Device in One Touch

By Brian Croxall

Think, dear ProfHacker readers, with me back to the beginning of this school year: about your plans to do better in your teaching, to do better in your research, and to blog more regularly. It turns out that ProfHacker too has aspirations at times that we don’t meet completely. For instance, you might recall our podcast. After a glorious first episode that aired in 2009 featuring Merlin Mann, we took a three-year hiatus (as all rockers do) until releasing episodes two and three this past September. Believe it or not, we recorded a fourth episode. Rumor has it that Jason is still editing it in his home studio, trying to give Kevin Shields a run for his money.

In any case, at the very end of episode three (starting at 40:50), Jason mentions a new favorite app of his, Launch Center Pro and how we hadn’t reviewed it on the site yet. Well, today’s the day, and it makes a fitting follow-up …

March 8, 2012, 11:00 am

Divide and Conquer Your Screen with Divvy

By Brian Croxall

Since moving to a Mac about four years ago, I’ve often thought about the differences between the interface on it and a Windows machine. Perhaps the most telling difference was the way I viewed different applications. In Windows, I tended to maximize every application, viewing it on a full screen. On a Mac, however, it’s actually quite difficult to maximize a single window, leading to a proliferation of overlapping windows on a desktop. I don’t actually mind that, but what I do mind is the difficulty in arranging all of these windows to get them positioned optimally for me to do my work. (It’s not all that hard to do this in Windows 7 with its Snap feature.)

Last spring, George covered BetterSnapTool, a way for Mac users to manage their different windows. In a comment to George’s post, “bdesham” suggested another option for accomplishing the same thing: Divvy. As I read about…

June 27, 2011, 8:00 am

Using Keyboard Shortcuts in Google Tools

By Brian Croxall

Last month I covered an easy way to create keyboard shortcuts for anything. Using the built-in tools of Mac OS X or AutoHotkey in Windows, you can customize keystrokes for any program to help you get your work done faster. Of course, many of us do our work in browsers these days. You can use shortcuts to control the browser itself—using Ctrl-T / Cmd-T to open a new tab, for example—but that will almost never help you control the specifics of a site.

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