undefined | Better HN

0 pointsIggleSniggle5y ago0 comments

Hey, it’s you! The author of Shortcat. I tried out your project maybe a year ago and absolutely loved the concept, but eventually had to give up on it when it kept crashing and didn’t reliably find what I was attempting to click on. I never knew if Shortcat was to blame or if it was the application not being properly presented to the Accessibility system.

Anyway, Shortcat is a freakin brilliant idea and I hope you keep working on it, or help this author with their project. If you think you’re going to have time to work on Shortcat again, though, I’d happily buy a copy (even if I already did before, I can’t remember if I did) and be an active bug reporter.

0 comments

_chendo_5y ago

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?

IggleSniggleOP5y ago

I wish I could remember how I came across Shortcat. It may have actually been simply that your product description matched what I was seeking so perfectly that it turned up on a Google search...or perhaps it was through some second-hand recommendation coming indirectly from a Google search like this one: https://gist.github.com/lornajane/3892c39098cf70baa9c7a1874c...

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.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse