![]() ![]() Those features should have probably been their own independent app. ![]() I start to feel my fingers again, press Command Tab once more, and while looking at the list of app icons I realise something. So what does my brain do when I feel burnt out? Gives me ideas for even more apps… # rcmd Maybe pressing Tab 4-5 times while visually assessing if the selected app icon is the one I want to focus, isn’t the best solution for this kind of workflow. We have two Command keys on a Mac keyboard, and the right hand side one is almost never used. What if I use it exclusively for switching apps? BETTERTOUCHTOOL PERMISSIONS MAC When I used Windows for reverse engineering malware, I liked switching apps using Win + Number where the number meant the position of the app icon in the taskbar. Using the app name felt the most natural. I remembered using Contexts for a while, which provides a Spotlight like search bar for fuzzy searching your running apps. My idea sounded a bit simpler: Right Command + the first letter of the app name But that needed a bit more key presses than I wanted (that is 1) and more attention than I wanted to give (which is none). So simple that people were offended by it… I pitched this idea to Ovidiu Rusu, a very good friend of mine, who surprisingly seemed to have the same need as me. We created the first prototype in about a week (icons and graphics take so much time…) and started using it in our day to day work to see if it made sense. In less than a day, rcmd became so ingrained in our app switching that we got incredibly annoyed when we had to quit the app for recompiling and debugging. We just kept pressing Right Command X and staring at the screen like complete idiots, not understanding why Xcode wasn’t being focused. What most people overlook when they have a simple idea is that 80% of the effort goes into handling edge cases that are not visible in the original idea. Just for this simple app we had to solve the following problems: What do I do when there are multiple running apps with the same first letter?.How do I decide which one gets priority so that I meet user expectations?.How do I get to the other apps with less priority in as few key presses as possible?.How do I persist key assignments if necessary?.What if the user assigned the key to an app that’s no longer running?.Should I launch the app when the key is pressed?.There are dozens of running apps while only about 10% of them are actual apps launched by the user.How do I filter those out? The others could be: How do I only listen to the Right Command key?.This last question is what led me to write this article. It turned out we needed to do quite a few hacks if we wanted to publish this app in the App Store. ![]() # The SandboxĮvery app that is submitted to the App Store must be compiled to run within a sandbox. ![]()
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