Year: 2012

[Keyboard Maestro](http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/) is the best tool you can purchase for your Mac.

It is a bigger upgrade for most people than doubling up your RAM — yet Keyboard Maestro is also a daunting tool to learn at first glance. The reason I will be writing a series on Keyboard Maestro is that all too often I watch people waste time doing repetitive things that could quickly and easily be solved with Keyboard Maestro. And yet Keyboard Maestro is not installed on most Macs.

When you really get down to it, Keyboard Maestro is a simple tool to learn and use. All you have to know are two things:

1. Your goal (Or what you want to accomplish with any given Keyboard Maestro macro.)
2. The steps to go from start to the finish to make that goal happen.

For example, if I wanted to grab text that’s highlighted in one application and paste it into the last used application, all I would need to know is the order of actions to do that:

1. Copy text.
2. Switch to last used application.
3. Paste text.

There’s no code to learn to figure how to make that work, you just look through the massive list of Keyboard Maestro actions and select the ones that accomplish your goal. Put them in the right order and move on.

Of course this is just the very tip of the iceberg for Keyboard Maestro — it can do, oh, so much more.

In the next post I will walk you through the basics of Keyboard Maestro to give you the building blocks needed to work through automating your Mac with Keyboard Maestro.

Following that I will walk you through many of the macros that I have built, so that you can either replicate them, or build off of each macro to fit your computing needs. At each step I will try to explain why I am doing something a certain way, especially if there are other ways that may be more obvious to use.

As with any tool, you will need to use Keyboard Maestro in the manner that best suits you to get the maximum benefit.

### Note to Advanced Users

If I can make a macro work without having to write a script or take you into shell commands, I will do so for two reasons:

1. It’s easier to understand and thus replicate.
2. It’s easier to change and tweak the settings without having to teach scripting.

There are many advantages to diving into scripting and shell commands, but those are for another series of posts — not this series. In some cases I will use simple scripting commands if I feel the benefits of doing so outweighs the complexity of using scripts.

The big tech news last night was that Steven Sinofsky was fired from Microsoft (([Ballmer notes that it is Sinofsky “leaving”](http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57548758-75/ballmers-memo-announcing-steven-sinofskys-departure/) which is a [nice way of saying that he was told to resign or be fired](http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/13/windows-8-is-just-great/).)) — Sinofsky was the head of Windows and *the* man in charge of Windows 8. Naturally, tech blogs exploded drawing parallels to Cook’s quasi-firing of Scott Forstall, head of iOS at Apple. Other than both companies being competitors (kind of) and both being high-level executives leaving the companies, there aren’t any other similarities between the two — so let’s stop that silliness now.

What’s more interesting about this move for Microsoft is what it means long-term for the company.

I’ve been a [long-time proponent of the “shit-can Steve Ballmer” movement](https://brooksreview.net/2011/05/ballmer/) and what this move by Ballmer & Co. says to me is: Ballmer is Microsoft’s guy.

Ballmer, in other words, just showed the world that he has 100% backing from Gates and the entire board. This, you could argue, is the closest similarity between Cook and Ballmer that exists.

[John Gruber commented](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/11/12/sinofsky-microsoft):

>How many heads are left to roll before we get to Ballmer’s? I’m thinking none.

I’m thinking Ballmer is going down with that ship — so to speak. It’s one thing if Ballmer was scapegoating Sinofsky, but he isn’t. Instead Ballmer simply removed another executive that he felt was:

1. Challenging him as CEO.
2. He didn’t like for whatever reason.

He did this with the backing of the board.

If the board is even somewhat skeptical about you as CEO of the company, no way they let you fire a CEO-in-waiting type that has been with the company since 1989. No way.

I highly doubt any of this had to do with Windows 8 success/failure, as it hasn’t even been out a month yet — so the results have yet to “come back”. This has likely been in the works for much longer, the timing only happening now because Ballmer wanted to make sure Windows 8 was launched without a hitch — now that it has launched, he didn’t need Sinofsky any longer.

I’ve not met a single rational and intelligent person that thinks Ballmer is on the right track or that he properly guides Microsoft — yet many of those same people say Sinofsky was on the right track.

If you are Ballmer, do you want Sinofsky around? I think not.

Yet the board and Ballmer clearly knew that Sinofsky could be an easy fit for CEO, so again: no way Ballmer could fire him without full support of the board.

Ballmer fired Sinofsky.

We can now infer two things from this:

1. Ballmer is fully supported by the Microsoft elites.
2. Ballmer is going no where — the Microsoft board won’t bring in an outside CEO and there isn’t a current Microsoft executive that would fit the role at this time.

This was a very bad move for Microsoft and [any hope that they were finally seeing the light](https://brooksreview.net/2012/06/ballmer-rebound/).

[The usually rational, Stephen Hackett is trading in his iPhone for a crappy Motorola flip phone.](http://512pixels.net/2012/11/hanging-up-on-iphone/) Stephen is tired of having his head down in his phone, which I think we can all understand, and here’s how he is going about this:

>In addition to my self-imposed 12-month timeframe, I’ve got an LTE iPad mini in the mail, set to be delivered Friday. It’s my first iPad with cellular data, and coupled with the Mini’s form factor, I think it will be a decent iPhone-replacement for the times I need data when I’m not in the office or at home.

Stephen freely admits that this could also be accomplished with self control:

>The problem is that five years of reaching in my front right pocket any time I’m free has created a strong habit, and I need to quit cold turkey.

Again, I get where he is coming from, but this just seems stupid to me. Not a publicity stunt stupid, or anything of that ilk, just a silly move to combat a *perceived* problem.

There is no doubt in my mind that we, as a society, need to get our heads out of our phones, however getting rid of portable computing isn’t the solution. The solution is finding what is addicting you and limiting that.

Addicted to Facebook? Delete the app. Addicted to Twitter? Delete the app. Email? Turn it off.

All of those actions can easily be reversed on the fly, with only a few minutes lost, yet they are annoying enough to reverse that we wouldn’t have the time to reverse the actions when we feel compelled to check.

I know this works, because I’ve done it. When I stopped using Twitter in favor of App.net, I noticed that I just stopped caring about checking either that often. My App.net feed is so slow that I can catch up every few hours, in a few minutes. Twitter is so irrelevant to me that I just check my mentions every few days.

This to me sounds like saying: “I’m quitting the Fourth of July because I don’t like lighting off fireworks.” Don’t buy the fireworks. ((Communist.))

I hate it when people say “guns don’t kill people…” and all that, but in this case it really isn’t the fault of the iPhone. It’s the fault of the user for being addicted. Now, luckily, that is easily solved by removing the addicting apps.

I’ve pushed a lot of addicting apps to my second home screen buried inside unnamed folders that I move regularly. This means I can still find stuff when I need/want to, but not fast enough for me to feel like I can just check on X “really quick”.

Maybe that doesn’t work for Stephen, but the benefits of having a phone like the iPhone with you 24/7 far out weigh the costs in my book. ((I say that now, hopefully the iPhone (et al) isn’t a leading cause of cancer later in life — but I suspect that it would be all cellphones not just smartphones.))