The Mac Feed

We aren’t going to lie – watching us work Mac OS X is a work of art. Windows fly and are suddenly resized, commands open apps and the mouse rarely sees any action except when it comes to multi-touch functions. Yet, no matter how it breaks down – we rely the most on a single key, the command key. In fact, we aren’t sure what we would do without it; yet, ergonis software decided to tell us what we were missing. We didn’t think it was possible, but we have learned a whole collection of shortcuts thanks to KeyCue.

What You Didn’t Know
Most of the commands that we use are fairly universal in the sense that they are essentially the same on Windows. The common “alt tab” command is command+tab. Save, open, new, print, select all, underline, bold and italicize are all the same as their Windows counterparts, except with command replacing control. But here’s the crazy: according to ergonis the average Mac OS X application had 40 to 80 menu shortcuts. Sure, we are aware of some of the more uncommon ones, but even when we tried to – we couldn’t think of 80 unique menu shortcuts (we got to 53.)

More of What You Didn’t Know
The image above is of TextMate and KeyCue – try to tell us you knew all that, seriously.

KeyCue is simple: you trigger it (the default is holding the command key down for three seconds) and it launches a menu that shows you all of the available commands that are currently available to you. In addition, you can move your cursor over them to select them. You might think that you know all of them – think again. As we write this in Blogo, KeyCue tells us that we have 102 different commands available to us. Some our unique to Blogo like the command to edit Trackbacks and some are system wide like the one to shift focus to the Dock. It’s actually quite fun to launch applications (via Quicksilver of course) and find out some of the new key commands – we seriously need to stop the geekiness.

Making Fast Quicker
We haven’t ever used QuicKeys, but KeyCue allows for the inclusion of QuicKeys. QuicKeys allow you to not only create abbreviations, but also automated shortcuts. We hope to provide more information later – all we can tell you is that the two combined would likely result in some massive increase in productivity.

Personal Tutoring, The Way We Like It
There is no better way to learn your way around OS X then KeyCue. Even seasoned users like us have plenty more to learn and plenty of ways to improve our efficiency. After having KeyCue for a couple weeks, we don’t know what we would do without it. For those that are obsessed with cool tricks that not only make windows fly around, but also improve efficiency – KeyCue could not be better. KeyCue runs without any icon in the dock and has numerous customization options that will allow you to control its behavior including: starting up at login and changing the triggers. In addition to the constant learning, If for some reason you don’t like the beautiful default Dashboard UI, KeyCue offers a couple of others with options for opacity – more accommodating then any of our teachers.

In Closing
There are a lot of people that KeyCue can help, a lot. From seasoned Mac users who love their shortcuts (us) to someone that isn’t sure why the command key is on the keyboard (or what the command key is). However, there is no group of users that would be better helped by KeyCue then seasoned Windows users switching. For users like us, there is no better way to learn all of the tricks hidden within Mac OS X than KeyCue and we would have adored an application like this when we were making the switch so long ago. KeyCue is available directly from ergonis for €19.99 and comes with free updates for two years. ergonis offers numerous discounts including discounts for multiple licenses and discounts for combining with the purchase of other ergonis applications.