November 19, 2018

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Moving Back to Ulysses

I moved my writing to Ulysses.

The writing was going well in iA Writer. The new version of iA Writer is well designed and can be the main program for all your work, it was mine. There is nothing to complain about when it comes to iA Writer, specially if you write in Markdown.

I feel embarrassed to say it, but I got bored in it. The lack of themes and the lack of the ability to use my own fonts got to me after a while.

It was not a logical decision. This was not a decision made with a list of bullet points which all point to the right decision. Looking at the same screen day after day got to be a drag specially when there was an alternative which let me do the three things which iA Writer didn’t:

  1. Use custom themes.
  2. Use my own font.
  3. Use a custom point for typewriter scrolling.

Yes. Ulysses is burdened by idiosyncratic support for Markdown. It has improved from previous versions, but it is a pain to use sometimes. Yes. It still doesn’t have tables. Yes. As a Markdown editor, iA Writer is superior to Ulysses at every level. But I got tired of looking at the same screen. I got tired of having a bunch of monospace fonts, I couldn’t use. I just got bored.

So, I am back to Ulysses. I wish I had a better reason to come back to Ulysses but I don’t. The gist of the matter is that I like writing in Ulysses.

I wish I could give you a reasoned explanation for why I like writing in Ulysses. Believe me I have tried to write it down, but it doesn’t quite cover it. I don’t have the right words for it. This is what I have:

  1. Ulysses has become better at handling Markdown with both the Paste as Markdown (⌘⌥+V) command and the Copy as Markdown (⌘⌥+C) command. Bringing in stuff which you have written elsewhere is less painful now.
  2. Ulysses has lovely themes. The ones which ship with the product and some of the ones you can add from the Ulysses Style Exchange. I like Gemmell Two, Red Graphite, and, a customized Solarized XL.
  3. The learning curve is non-existent. That might be a function of my familiarity with the application or the fact that this is a limited function text editor.
  4. The ability to hide all the chrome and have your writing in screen in windowed or full-screen mode is good for concentration.
  5. The ability to specify line length (90 characters), the line height (1.7), and no paragraph spacing is something that gives me enough clarity on screen to be able to read the stuff I write.
  6. I like the keyboard commands of Ulysses. If you use it, learn them. They are available here.
  7. The best thing about using Ulysses is the act of writing in it. The customizable point for typewriter scrolling and the ability to use my own fonts are two of the things I was missing in iA Writer. I like the theme switch from the windowed to the full-screen look. I am fond of working in Solarized.

I have come to the conclusion that productivity in writing is not a function of what editor you use to write. It is a function of your motivation and the commitment that you bring to the task. It helps when you don’t have to fight your editor. I conceptualize that as friction. Ulysses is admirably low friction. That is what makes me come back to it, again and again. I am going to stop fighting it, and just enjoy writing in it.

The plan is to stay in Ulysses for a while.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Hat Tip: Photo by Sebastian Soerensen from Pexels

Ulysses writing markdown
October 29, 2018

Subscriptions Are Not the Magic Bullet

The Way ForwardThe Way Forward

This is the original article which revealed Apple’s interactions with app developers: Why Apple had a secret meeting with app developers in New York to discuss the App Store - INSIDER

These are some of the reactions to the news:

Apple reportedly pushing developers to move to subscriptions | iLounge News

Apple is secretly encouraging paid app developers to switch to subscription – ldstephens

Apple Privately Advocates for Developer Adoption of Subscriptions – MacStories

Gruber living up to his growing reputation as a stenographer for Apple PR, posits in Daring Fireball that,

Up front paid apps are going the way of the dodo. Whether you think that’s good or bad, it doesn’t matter. That’s where things are going.

No editorial. No comment. Only the assertion that you plebs should mindlessly follow what your corporate overlords are setting out for you. That is Gruber now. I remember when he had a spine and insight.

These are examples of companies who are doing fine without resorting to subscriptions:

  1. OmniGroup with products OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle and OmniPlan. These products are icons in the professional category of software on the macOS. No subscriptions. One time payment with upgrade revenue on new versions.
  2. Bare Bones Software and their product BBEdit 12. One time purchase, with upgrade revenue.
  3. Things. Again, one time purchase with upgrade revenue.
  4. Highland 2. One time purchase with upgrade revenue.
  5. Utilities like Hazel, Keyboard Maestro, Alfred, LaunchBar, and so on.

I could go on. In fact, I will:

  1. ScreenFlow
  2. Fantastical and Cardhop for Mac
  3. Scrivener
  4. Final Draft
  5. iA Writer
  6. Pixelmator Pro
  7. Acorn

The irony is that Apple is not following its own advice:

  1. Logic Pro X - Apple
  2. Final Cut Pro X - Apple
  3. Pages, Numbers and Keynote are free.

Are subscriptions the only way to go?

Hell no.

What Does a Developer Do?

The carrot is increased revenue. Is that always a by-product of a subscription? The answer is the usual difficult fence-sitting one, “It depends.”

You have to consider a mixture of factors, and they act in concert:

  1. The goals for the product.
  2. The nature of the product.
  3. The nature of the market.

Growing income stream. Increasing market share. Retaining market share. Provision of enough income to support the creation of a software company. These are all goals which are relevant to my discussion.

You are trying to price a viable product. Viable in the sense that it is going to provide enough income to justify its development. That is a function of the size of the market it serves, the market penetration you can achieve and the price you are willing to charge for it.

Viability is a function of the nature of the product. For instance, a utility which performs a singular task required by the consumer sporadically is not going to be enough to build a software company around. Yet, it can be a part of a mix of solutions which together provide the foundations of a software company. Pricing for such products can be a mix of both subscription pricing and full version pricing. For instance, Gemini 2 is a product which finds duplicate files on hard drives and gives you the option of deleting these duplicates to increase hard drive space and reduce clutter from hard drives. Not a product which you are going to be using too many times. I can envisage a dual pricing strategy for such a product. A monthly subscription price and a full version price. The full version price is going to be something some consumers who need this feature on a consistent basis will prefer. The monthly subscription will be preferred by consumers who want the product for a few uses at a particular time but are turned off by the full version price. This ensures that you are segmenting the marketplace through your pricing strategy. The heavy users pay a different price from the occasional user.

Products can be classified on the basis of how critical they are to the workflow of the consumer. Alfred is one of the apps which I consider to be essential to the use of my macOS devices. It is one of the first apps I install on a new Mac. They have an interesting pricing strategy. A free version which does the basics of file launching, file finding, and basic web searching. The product comes into its own with a Powerpack purchase. They price it at £19. They have a Mega Supporter license which entitles the consumer to free lifetime upgrades for £35. They periodically will introduce a new version requiring the regular users to pay a reduced upgrade price. This does not happen often. I have been using the product for almost six years now and they are at version 3.7. The paying upgrades are few and far between for the regular consumer. I am a Mega Supporter and that is the best money I have spent on software.

The marketplace for a product like Alfred has a couple of competitors. A product called Quicksilver is a free app which had a fanatical fan base for a while. Development has been sporadic on the product. The other competitor is LaunchBar 6. This is a commercial product which has a dedicated group of users whose fingers have become infused with LaunchBar mojo. It is priced at $29 with $19 as the upgrade price from previous versions.

Both Alfred and LaunchBar are leaving money on the table. They can charge more for their product. They can switch to subscription pricing for their pricing. In fact, they can do pretty much whatever they want to do with their pricing strategy. Initially when the products were launched, they faced competition from Quicksilver, a free solution, which was being developed actively and also had gathered a large user base. The conservative pricing is a legacy of those times. Quicksilver is long dead. Both Alfred and LaunchBar have managed to carve out sizable chunks of the market and are by nature products which have high switching costs. They can both switch to a subscription pricing model of something like $19 a year without seeing any large decrease in their user base.

Both companies seem to be content with the existing pricing structure though. Alfred is a single product company. Yes, they have Alfred Remote on iOS, but that seems a proof of concept product rather than a viable product. Objective Development is a three product company. They sell Little Snitch 4, Micro Snitch, and LaunchBar. Little Snitch is a crucial security product for users, and has a dedicated, loyal user base. Micro Snitch is relatively newer and I am not familiar with it. The strategies of the two companies are a tad different in that Objective Development has a focus on security and productivity, while Running with Crayons Ltd. the company behind Alfred has all its eggs in the Alfred business.

In that context, Alfred is more conservative in their approach to the pricing question than Objective Development has to be with the pricing of LaunchBar.

Take another segment in the marketplace. Writing software. This is another market where there are multiple competitors. The main players are Scrivener and Ulysses. There are a host of other competitors in the marketplace but these are the two which hold the most marketshare.

Ulysses is a product which is wedded to the Apple eco-system. They have a macOS version and an iOS version of their product and you pay a single subscription price for the product on both platforms. It is a subscription of $39.99/year.

Scrivener is a cross-platform solution. Starting life in the macOS platform. Scrivener is available on macOS, iOS and Windows. It is $45 for a full version on macOS and Windows. The iOS version is $19.99. I have been a customer for almost ten years and they have gone from version 1 to version 3 in that time. Major version upgrades come along at the rate of every three years or more. My total outlay for this piece of software has been around $90 for ten years. Say $10/year for easier comparison.

For writers, writing software is crucial to their livelihood. Aspiring writers will try out a subset of the competing offerings, or follow some recommendation from a colleague to acquire and adopt a software solution. Then comes the deep dive. Ulysses less so than Scrivener is different from other solutions available in the marketplace in both focus and implementation of its many features. Requires a deep dive into the internals to get use out of Scrivener. I have been recommending Scrivener for a long while to all my acquaintances who express an interest in writing of any form. I tell them to not get overburdened by the intricacies of the program. Start using the program and the features will be revealed when you need them and you will have to get into the manual and become familiar with the particular feature. Bite sized learning works best for a beast like Scrivener.

Ulysses is a simpler alternative. If you are familiar with any software, it will take you a few hours to know everything that Ulysses is capable of. Its simplicity is a part of its charm.

They both tackle the problem of putting words into the computer. Arranging them into a form which makes sense to you and wringing out an output which is usable for whatever purpose you have destined for them. You write. You edit. You write some more. You edit a lot more. Finally when you get tired of this cycle or think that the product is ready, you output into a word document to send to your editor, or a pdf file to print out and obsess over every word, or output an ePub to send to a digital house to put it out for sale. That is the cycle every writer is familiar with. That is the purpose of writing software. Both products fulfill these needs. Scrivener has more tools to help you with the process of writing. Ulysses takes a minimalistic approach to the problem. A blank page with your words in it. Minimal tag, keyword, comment and annotation support, writing goals, and a self-contained library of files to make the writing easy.

One other important distinction: Scrivener is a rich text environment, Ulysses is a plain text environment with minimal support of Markdown for formatting goodness.

Since these are two of the most popular products in the writing space, most writers are familiar with both products. Some writers use both. Scrivener for book-length projects, Ulysses for short projects is a common break-up of tasks. There are of course switchers, people who started with one and ended up in the other because of their own reasons. There are those who swear allegiance to one or the other. They are rabid about it sometimes. But these are the two main choices in the marketplace.

Ulysses changed from the usual pricing strategy to a subscription pricing model a little more than a year ago. I wrote Learning from Ulysses’ Struggles With the Switch to a Subscription Model.

I don’t have sales numbers on the two products. I follow the discussions on both these products on Twitter. Conversations about Scrivener outnumber Ulysses mentions two to one. A contribution to the difference is that Scrivener is cross-platform, but it also means that the number of users might be indicated by the difference in the number of mentions.

Literature and Latte, the developer of Scrivener are a two-product company. They have a basic mind-mapping application called Scapple which works well with Scrivener. Ulysses is a one-product company.

I am sure that both companies have their own reasons behind their pricing strategies. The major difference is one is subscription based and the other is not. In fact, for Scrivener it is almost a product feature. It makes Scrivener different from Ulysses to those users who are rabid opponents of this recent trend towards subscriptions. When Ulysses made the change, the main developer of Scrivener made sure that both existing and prospective customers knew that there was no immediate intention to move to a subscription model from Literature and Latte.

Who is right? Both of them are. Ulysses decided to move to subscriptions for their own reasons. Scrivener decided to stick with their old model for their own reasons. They are both viable companies making a living in the writing space and trying to fulfill their growth goals through their pricing strategy.

It is instructive to see the different approaches from both companies to achieve viability:

  1. Ulysses moved to a subscription model.
  2. Scrivener moved to a cross-platform model with versions for iOS, macOS and Windows. There are rumors of a Linux version and an Android version.

They are the market leaders. The question is a more complicated if you choose to be a challenger to them. What do you do? Do you adopt a subscription pricing strategy and undercut the Ulysses price? Do you match their pricing and focus on a different task in the writing space? Do you build a product which is feature competitive with Scrivener and introduce subscription pricing to reduce the barriers of entry? What about a competitor to Scrivener with a subscription price of $20/year to compete? What about a competitor to Ulysses with more evolved support of Markdown with a non-subscription pricing model, like MWeb?

The choices that a product makes lets its prospective competitors position their offerings as different from them through the use of their choices. MWeb should be marketed with a focus on complete Markdown support and no subscription pricing.

Subscription pricing does build a system of lock-in. When the consumer buys the subscription to Ulysses and the time comes to renew, they already have a year invested in the product, it is easier to renew the subscription than consider the move to a competitor. There are the factors of a learning curve and the resultant aversion to change, along with the ease of the App Store, which acts together to keep consumers from switching. This applies to the full price + upgrade revenue model too, but in the case of subscription, the yearly investment through the App Store makes it a more compelling proposition. Faced with the need to make a decision, consumers choose the easiest decision which is renew the subscription.

Developers need to keep this advantage of subscriptions in mind when you decide on a pricing strategy.

As you can tell, there is no one good answer for all eventualities. When Apple tells you to move to subscriptions, tell them to go pound sand. Something that works for one developer is not necessarily the magic bullet for everyone. Circumstances define the correct choices. Don’t fall for the notion that:

Up front paid apps are going the way of the dodo. Whether you think that’s good or bad, it doesn’t matter. That’s where things are going.

Why is Apple Pushing Subscriptions?

I don’t have a good answer to this question except some speculation. They have found it difficult to implement upgrade pricing in the App stores and that might have forced this increased belief in subscriptions.

I would find this move more credible if they implemented subscription pricing for their own offerings. The absence of subscription for Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X gives me pause. If it is good for developers, it must be good for Apple. Why the disconnect?

How Do I Build a Software Business?

If subscription pricing is not the answer what is the answer?

Take care of the basics. The basics remain relevant today as they have been for a while.

  1. Design and develop a product which works well.
  2. Manage to differentiate your product from the competition.
  3. Churn. Improve your product.
  4. Charge a fair price.
  5. Provide support.
  6. Try to build a community around your product.

These are all factors which define whether your product is going to be successful in the marketplace. A subscription model does not make this activity redundant. In fact, a subscription model might aggravate the pain for some developers. Two examples of this are what is facing Bear and Ulysses. Both products are facing inquiries from consumers about the progress that they have made in the period where they are generating subscription revenue. This is new territory. If developers make the assertion that they need subscription revenue to justify development of the product, consumers are bound to ask for evidence of this development. Both Bear and Ulysses are struggling to justify the quantity and quality of such development.

In the old model, the expectations were different. Major version release followed by free interim bug-fix updates, followed by major version upgrades which include new features and the resultant upgrade revenue. That model is not relevant for subscriptions. Consumers demand continuous improvements, to justify their investment in the product.

The answer then is the same as it has been for a long long while. Do the basics. Do them well. Yell as loud as you can. Reach as many customers as you can. Give them a compelling reason to give you their business.

Charge your consumers a subscription price or the traditional pricing model. Do your best to justify the price you charge. Whatever price you charge, by whatever mechanism you choose, try to create customers who would be happy to pay you more. That is the secret.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Credits: Photo by Voicu Oara from Pexels

developers macOS subscriptions
September 30, 2018

Paper Floats a Cursor to Keep You Focused

Paper iconPaper icon

Product: Paper
Product Web Site: Paper… for writers
Price: Free
In-App Purchases: Personalization & Writers Tools: $9.99 each.

Paper is an interesting product. It is a minimal text editor which supports both plain text and rich text modes. I am going to ignore all of its rich text goodness because I work in plain text and rich text is irrelevant to me.

Ostensibly geared towards minimalism in its features and implementation, Paper is a deep product which provides users a curated set of options. It tends to hide its options through a novel implementation of menus changing based on whether you have the ⌥ key pressed or not. For instance, this is the Format menu with no ⌥ key pressed.

Paper FormatPaper Format

This is the same menu with ⌥ key pressed.

Paper Format + OptionPaper Format + Option

Paper does this with all its menus. It tries to hide complexity from the user but gives the user the opportunity to delve in to the complexity when the user wants to. It is a commendable goal, letting the user have the option of easing into the intricacies of the program if they choose.

The Floating Cursor

Borrowing the feature from Word’s “smooth cursor” animation, Paper has a cursor which flows along the screen. You type and the cursor glides along the screen. The cursor is colored blue, I guess that is borrowed from iA Writer. In fact, Paper looks and feels like an ancient incantation of iA Writer without the elegance of the customized Nitti font, or the support of a modern Markdown implementation, like MultiMarkdown or any attempt to tackle your file hierarchy.

The origins of the features of Paper might be a tad questionable but the effect of the cursor gliding on the screen is hypnotic and compelling.

How Well Does Paper Do Markdown?

Paper supports the basic implementation of Gruber’s Markdown. It is significant in that the specs were last updated on 17 Dec 2004. Markdown has evolved significantly. Paper supports the basic implementation and does that well. I am not certain that is enough in the current marketplace.

Paper competes with products which are distinguished by their support of one of the advanced variants of Markdown. That means that Paper lags in supporting the following Markdown elements:

  1. Footnotes.
  2. Tables.
  3. Task Lists.
  4. Subscripts and Superscripts.
  5. Citations.
  6. Glossary.

This is not a comprehensive list. You can go to MultiMarkdown Guide to see what a modern day implementation of Markdown looks like. There are products in the marketplace which support the full-suite of a modern Markdown implementation and they are all competing with Paper.

Paper competes with:

  1. iA Writer: The Focused Writing App for Mac, Windows, Android, iPhone and iPad supports a customized MultiMarkdown.
  2. MultiMarkdown Composer v4 supports MultiMarkdown.
  3. MWeb - Pro Markdown writing, note taking and static blog generator App - MWeb supports Github Flavored Markdown (GFM).

This is not a comprehensive list. There are a ton of other competitors. So, in this mass of competitive products why would you adopt Paper?

The developer feels that there is a space available in the marketplace for a product which supports basic Markdown and gives people an environment to write in without the full-featured support of a modern Markdown implementation. He could well be right. The reviews on the macOS App Store seem to support this point of view. Paper is well-reviewed by its users.

I am not so certain but I am aware that I am far removed from the usual user. I am comfortable with Markdown. I live in Markdown. My needs are not typical. For those starting out in Markdown or just looking for a program to write in without a specific focus on Markdown, Paper is not a bad solution.

Paper Features

This is a list of the features which I found interesting in Paper:

Paper Font ChoicesPaper Font Choices

Font Choice: Paper gives you a pre-defined choice of fonts to write in.

Paper Paragraph OptionsPaper Paragraph Options

Paragraph Format: I love that Paper gives me the option of specifying Line Height and Spacing for my paragraphs.

Paper Focus ModePaper Focus Mode

Focus Mode: Paper gives you a choice of Paragraph or Sentence in its Focus Mode. This is similar to the behavior in Byword.

Paper Line LengthPaper Line Length

Line Length: Paper lets you set your preferred line length.

Polyglot Clipboard: I was confused about what “polyglot clipboard” was. This is the developer explaining the feature:

A clipboard that knows many languages/formats :) Basically, you can copy (export) into many formats and paste (import) from many formats.

Copy Markdown from Paper and paste to a rich text editor like TextEdit and it will insert Markdown as formatted text. Copy from TextEdit and paste to Paper and it will insert formatted text as Markdown. Pasting Markdown to a plain text editor will insert Markdown as is, of course.

Holding Option key in Edit menu reveals options to import/export HTML from/to clipboard. There is also an option to “Paste as Plain Text” in case you don’t want to carry over any formatting to Paper. This option changes to “Paste and Match Style” in Rich Text Mode to match the same feature in rich text editors like TextEdit.

All of that works seamlessly in Rich Text Mode as well. You can, for example, copy some Markdown from a plain text editor and paste it to Paper in Rich Text Mode. Paper will insert this Markdown as formatted text.

For a product which supports both plain text and rich text, this is an interesting addition and customers who work in both plain and rich text are going to get a lot of use out of this feature.

This is a product which is designed with care and attention to detail.

Conclusions

If you are interested in a Markdown based text editor there are better choices in the marketplace. On the other hand, if you are not completely sold on Markdown, and want a well designed environment to write in, Paper is a solid choice. It is a conglomeration of features from the best of breed in this category and it is a pleasure to follow the floating blue cursor around the screen.

Paper is recommended for folks who are new to Markdown, or are not enamored by Markdown.

An Alternate Review: Paper is a unique macOS text editor for iA Writer and Word 2016 fans

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

macOS Markdown Text Editor
September 25, 2018

iA Writer Tackles Tags

iA Writer IconiA Writer Icon

Product: iA Writer
Price: $29.99

Version 5.0 of iA Writer introduced the ability to handle folders and favorites to the minimal Markdown based text editor. Version 5.1 takes a swing at tags.

Tags are implemented from inside the documents. You type the tag into the document and the program automatically adds it to the tag list or adds the document to an existing tag list if this was a pre-existing tag. Tags are an organizational aid which makes iA Writer powerful.

iA Writer HashtagsiA Writer Hashtags

Folder support made it possible to live in iA Writer with all my documents. Tag support lets me live in iA Writer efficiently.

iA Writer SmartFolder CreationiA Writer SmartFolder Creation

Along with tags has come Smart Folders.

iA Writer SmartFoldersiA Writer SmartFolders

Smart Folders makes it easy to manage a huge collection of notes.

iA Writer GoTo MenuiA Writer GoTo Menu

The new organization is depicted in both the Library sidebar and the Go menu.

Conclusion

iA Writer started out as a simple piece of digital real estate with a pre-set font and a thick blue cursor to tackle your writing needs. It has evolved. It is a feature rich Markdown based writing environment which has the ability to tackle all your writing and file-management needs in one program.

I live in it. I consider the present iteration of iA Writer to be the best Markdown based writing environment available on the macOS.

iA Writer 5.1 is recommended heartily.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Additional Reading

The folks at iA talk about iA Writer and tags. Write to Organize - iA Writer: The Focused Writing App

iA Writer macOS Markdown
September 16, 2018

SuperTab Supercharges the ⌘+Tab Experience

SuperTab IconSuperTab Icon

Product: SuperTab
Price: $10 (50% off sale)

The stock macOS function of ⌘+Tab is the list of running apps. Mac users are used to that and use it for switching between applications. SuperTab adds a slew of features to the ⌘+Tab function.

You can define any keyboard command you want, in my case I use ⌥+Tab. This way you can have the standard behavior through ⌘+Tab, while you enjoy the goodness of SuperTab through ⌥+Tab.

SuperTabSuperTab

SuperTab gives you complete control over the content of what it calls, Tab Rows. You have the choice of showing the following:

  • Active Applications - list of active applications. This is the usual system behavior.
  • Dock Items - the items in your Dock.
  • Application Windows - the individual windows in your applications. Thanks to the new tab behavior in macOS, you get to open all your tabs in one tabbed window, and SuperTab does not have the ability to show you the individual tabs. It gives you access to the whole tabbed window. That reduces the benefit of having individual application windows accessible.
  • Recent Applications - this is the list of recent applications you have used.
  • Recent Documents - the recent documents you have opened.
  • Dropbox or Desktop Contents
  • Folder Contents - you can specify the folders you want to access.
  • Calendar Items - see your Calendar Items and their details.
  • Clipboard History - the recent contents of your Mac’s Clipboard.
  • Snagit Captures - preview, copy, share and open your Snagit Captures.
  • Tagged Items - the files, folders & applications with the Tags or Labels you specify.
  • Sidebar Items - items that appear in the Sidebar of Finder Windows.
  • Custom Items - this includes saved Spotlight searches, System Preferences, Web sites and a whole host of other items.

SuperTab Preferences

SuperTab Preferences 1SuperTab Preferences 1

SuperTab is a mature product and it shows in the way the product is designed. There are several ways you can choose to invoke the product.

SuperTab Preferences 2SuperTab Preferences 2

You get to define how the SuperTab window looks and behaves.

SuperTab Preferences 3SuperTab Preferences 3

Supports multi-screen workspaces and gives you complete control over the behavior of SuperTab once it is invoked.

SuperTab Preferences 4SuperTab Preferences 4

SuperTab is keyboard focused and it gives you the option of a few commands which let you act on a chosen item through the use of keystrokes. Makes the process of working in SuperTab fun and you get to efficiently sling around keystrokes to control your Mac.

Conclusion

SuperTab performs a subset of the actions performed by utilities like Alfred and Keyboard Maestro. If you are not using these macro utilities, you can adopt SuperTab to gain a chest of utilities which are convenient and useful.

This is a mature product which is well-designed, stable and full-featured and is a great product to add to your normal day-to-day workflows with your Mac.

I liked the product but find that I use Keyboard Maestro and Alfred to perform most of the tasks that SuperTab brings to the Mac. Of course, SuperTab is not competing with the macro utilities. SuperTab’s charm is that it works out of the box and doesn’t require you to write workflows or macros to do any of its tasks. For non-technical users, SuperTab is a great product. For those of you comfortable with writing code, you might want to look at Alfred and/or Keyboard Maestro.

SuperTab is heartily recommended for novice users and users uncomfortable with code.

A licensed version was provided by the developer for a review.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

SuperTab macOS utilities