soundtrane Posted March 31, 2006 Report Share Posted March 31, 2006 Any ideas on how to do this? This is easy on XP - though lots of people don't know about it. Also, I have never been able to figure out if I can use the keyboard shortcuts menu on the System Preferences pane to do this. It simply won't work. I'd be happy if i can say - hit Apple-Option-C to start the calculator. -vin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Wexler Posted March 31, 2006 Report Share Posted March 31, 2006 Any ideas on how to do this? This is easy on XP - though lots of people don't know about it. Also, I have never been able to figure out if I can use the keyboard shortcuts menu on the System Preferences pane to do this. It simply won't work. I'd be happy if i can say - hit Apple-Option-C to start the calculator. -vin I don't think there is a system level way to configure keyboard launching of applications. There are many, many 3rd party utilities, many FREE that work very well, to provide you with other ways of launching applications. Try going to versiontracker.com and look under Mac OSX search for "launcher" and you will see a lot of utilities that do this. The example you gave, launchng the Calculator, could possibly be a good thing to do with Widgets (even though I do very little with Widgets, or Expose, or quite a few of the features of Mac OS X 10.4. Regards, Jeff Wexler Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soundtrane Posted March 31, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 31, 2006 scott, i've tried that many times. for example, if i want a shortcut to start Calculator, I add a + to the Finder and 'type in the exact command' according to OSX - 'Calculator'. I even tried "Launch Calculator", but it does not work. I guess this facility is supposed to work WITHIN programs, for example if i want a shortcut to do something within Calculator. jeff, i do know i could use a third party app, but somewhere this got me wondering if such a simple requirement could have been addressed by Apple in the first place. A lot of us are very keyboard friendly because we started using computers before the mouse arrived. till date, i still find a mouse cumbersome for most regular tasks. thanks for your posts! -vin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soundtrane Posted March 31, 2006 Author Report Share Posted March 31, 2006 on XP, I had a keyboard shortcut to start off almost every regular program i used - Calculator, Notepad, Word, Excel, IE, Outlook, etc etc... it was simple - just rightclick for properties of the main executable and add a keyboard shortcut in the field provided. -vin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Wexler Posted March 31, 2006 Report Share Posted March 31, 2006 jeff, i do know i could use a third party app, but somewhere this got me wondering if such a simple requirement could have been addressed by Apple in the first place. A lot of us are very keyboard friendly because we started using computers before the mouse arrived. till date, i still find a mouse cumbersome for most regular tasks. thanks for your posts! -vin For most tasks you can use the keyboard with the Mac (and almost all keyboard equivalent commands appear in menus to the right of the named menu command), and what I have liked about the keyboard commands is that they are almost always consistent system wide and with all applications. I still think it is not possible, within the OS, to make custom keyboard commands to launch applications. I could very well be wrong and Scott Farr seems to indicate that this CAN be done from System Preferences shortcut panel. I would be very careful here if you decide to experiment. There are already multiple ways to do almost every task that I have never felt the need to launch programs exclusively with the keyboard. One tip you may not know is this: launch all the applications you may likely want to use and then HIDE the programs you are not using (Mac OS X has excellent dynamic RAM allocation so having lots of programs launched and ready is not usually an issue). Then, by hitting Command + TAB (the "command" key as you know is sometimes called the Apple key and has the cloverleaf) an oncreen program switcher appears where you can toggle through to the active program you want to use. Regards, Jeff Wexler Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Gray Posted March 31, 2006 Report Share Posted March 31, 2006 I would recommend using the program Launchbar, available at www.obdev.at If you like, it will really speed up your interactions with your computer. There are other similar utilities like Quicksilver that you might like more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff Wexler Posted March 31, 2006 Report Share Posted March 31, 2006 I would recommend using the program Launchbar, available at www.obdev.at If you like, it will really speed up your interactions with your computer. There are other similar utilities like Quicksilver that you might like more. I don't think soundtrane wants to use any 3rd party program (I always wonder who the 2nd party is) to improve his keyboard control of the launching process, he wants to use OS X itself because that's the way, evidently, it is done with Windows XP. I personally like all the options already built into OS X for doing just about everything and I am quite comfortable with most all of them. There are lots of good add on utility programs that do as little as you may want or much more than you may want. Launchbar is very good as is Quicksilver. There are also several programs that are generally referred to as "Finder replacements" meaning that they alter completely the normal user interface and function to the OS. One such program, I don't remember what it is called, mimics the option that Microsoft offered, a "Finder" with an interface that resembles Internet Explorer --- I think MS called it Explorer or something and the Mac program is called maybe Mac Explorer? I tried it and did not prefer it in any way to the normal Mac OS X Finder. Regards, Jeff Wexler Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soundtrane Posted April 1, 2006 Author Report Share Posted April 1, 2006 hi jeff, i use command - tab and command - tilde all the time. scott, i'll try again, maybe i'm doing something wrong. i'd rather like a two-button combo, but hey, if a three-button works that's good. thanks a lot -vin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soundtrane Posted April 1, 2006 Author Report Share Posted April 1, 2006 hey scott, do you put the shortcut under Finder? or somewhere else? dang... -vin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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