Excessive

Today's App of the day is again an OS X app which I've found extremely useful in that it does things that should be built right into the OS.

Here is a description of Spark taken directly from it's download page:

Spark is a powerful and easy to use shortcuts manager which allows you to create and organize accessible shortcuts any time.

With Spark you can create Hot Keys to launch applications and documents, execute AppleScript, command iTunes, and more...

You can also export and import your Hot Keys library, or save it in HTML format to print it.

Here are two examples of what I use it for:

For one, I have two hotkeys set up for use with iTunes. One is Next Song, which when pressed, skips to the next song in iTunes, no matter what app you're in, what window has focus, or if iTunes is even on the screen, it will just skip to the next song. The second iTunes hotkey I have is to Play/Pause, which simply stops or starts the current song, again regardless if iTunes has focus or not. I have the Next Song hotkey set to control-alt-N and Play/Pause set to control-alt-P. You'd think iTunes would have that kind of feature built in.. being able to control your music without directly selecting the iTunes window.

Secondly, I have control-alt-G set to launch the app/utility Grab. I use Grab every once and awhile.. not often enough to justify keeping it in the dock, but I use it enough that's it's annoying to have to navigate to it's location in the finder. By setting up this hotkey, I can simply press the hotkey and Grab is launched, as simple as that. You can set any application to run, to a countless number of key combinations, so you can really do anything.

So long as in the Spark preferences you have 'Enable Spark hotkeys at login' you can just set and forget these hotkeys, and you don't ever have to open Spark again.

Spark Download (2.8 MB)
Spark Homepage

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