To properly demo my apps, I need to communicate keyboard shortcuts, and a while back the only player in that game was the free, open source Keycastr. Unfortunately, Keycastr didn’t nail the visuals for me. The keyboard shortcuts are difficult to digest as a viewer, and the modifier key display is not prominent.

I think other developers had the same issues, and a couple more solutions popped up (SuperUser question). In normal circumstances, I would have purchased one of the other solutions and carried on working on my other apps. For demoing Charmstone, I was able to whip up Modkey…

When it comes to switching applications, there is no shortage of options to get the one you want in front of you. Before creating Hookshot, I would have never thought about trying to add another solution to the mix. Using Hookshot has dramatically improved my window management experience, so I decided to try out the same concept with launching applications in Charmstone.

Here’s a screenshot of the initial UI for it:

With the ubiquity of window manager applications in macOS, it is surprisingly easy to run out of good, unique keyboard shortcuts that do not interfere with other applications. A common solution for this problem is to remap a key (often caps lock) to the “hyper key”: a combination of shift, control, option, and command. Since this modifier key combination is very unlikely to be taken by shortcuts in any application, it collectively becomes an extra modifier key. My take on this solution is a single purpose app called Hyperkey.

Remapping caps lock to the hyper key is actually quite easy…

One of the most common requests I have received for Rectangle is the addition of shortcuts for more window dimensions that are not currently in the app. The preferences window for Rectangle is already pretty packed with shortcuts, and in my opinion, there is a limit to how many shortcuts are desirable in its current UI.

In Hookshot, I went with a table view so that it isn’t quite so overwhelming to have more shortcuts. This frees Hookshot from a UI restriction on the quantity of shortcuts, but it removes an element of simplicity and immediate accessibility. …

In every single post I’ve seen where someone asks which apps they should install on their new mac, one of the first suggestions is a window manager. Rectangle is increasingly mentioned (thanks!), but I still see Spectacle users that say they have no reason to switch. If Spectacle does it for you, that’s awesome — it’s a great app, but there are some concrete reasons to go with Rectangle, even outside of a direct feature comparison.

Apple Silicon

As of v0.38, Rectangle is available as a universal binary that runs on both Intel and Apple Silicon. Currently the only way to get…

A while back, I created a free app called Scroll to allow users to scroll with just one finger on an Apple trackpad. The first iteration of the app was really slim, and was really just aimed to solve an accessibility issue for people that were unable to use two fingers easily to scroll. I received a lot of feedback for the app, and surprising to me, a lot of the feedback came from users that did not have any impediments to using two fingers for scrolling. I finally got a chance to work through a lot of the suggestions…

The Magic Mouse is awesome, but some apps are overly sensitive to its horizontal scroll — to the point where it’s kinda unusable. My latest iteration of the Scroll app aims to solve this problem in a simple way.

Maybe I’m weird, but I‘ve never been that excited about the first party apps for Google Drive and Dropbox because I like to keep my cloud drives in the cloud and separate from my local drives. The official apps are built around syncing and integrating with Finder and I found myself always using the browser instead. HighTop started out as a shortcut for me to access my Google Drive directly in the menu bar, and it grew into a pretty full featured client for Google Drive and Dropbox.

This quick access to my cloud files was so convenient that I…