My smartphone as a shortcut helper | Hacker News Reader

My smartphone as a shortcut helper

mathieupassenaud.fr

For me, the issue with the Touch Bar, and with this software is that it misses the reason I want shortcuts in the first place. I don't want another screen with shifting context, I want to rely on muscle memory to execute a task _without_ UI context. I want to interact with graphical context using my main display (touch or otherwise), and I don't want to use a smaller less flexible display for this task.

That said it is a neat technical achievement, and I applaud any effort to improve the HMI.

Exactly. What I'd like to have is a tool that analyzes what I do, and reminds me what shortcuts I can use to be more efficient. It would be awesome to have that on my smartphone screen like the solution on display here.

I would be very happy just to have the shortcut written on the right of the menu option like is was when interfaces were still sane.

But yes, I would like that assistant too.

This is to some extend implemented in Samsung's screen edge feature found on phones with curved screens (although it is not context aware by default):

http://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00047881/

Maybe this could be a solution?- http://www.martinhajek.com/the-1st-accessory-for-the-oled-ma...

I feel that recognisable and consistent tactile feedback is so important for developing and executing muscle memory. Today on most devices this element is largely overlooked (eg. compare a walkman with physical buttons to an music application on a flat screen surface).

Touch screen devices with vibration hardware have not really addressed the haptic positioning and behaviour of tactile feedback.

All of this to me is a loss of opportunity to exercise an additional "input method".

In the future I expect to see somewhat of a non-flat screen that's able to reposition the height or texture of its area to facilitate the do-not-have-to-look precision requirements of today's on-screen buttons. Somewhat of a 3D holographic surface which you can touch or otherwise feel.

There was a concept like this floating around the internet a couple of years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelhR2iPuw0

http://gizmodo.com/keyboards-that-rise-out-of-a-touchscreen-...

I guess the more interesting solution is power-user specific: it knows what you're focusing on/working on and shows the list of keyboard shortcuts relevant to your current activity. Debugging? Here are the pause, step, return, etc, shortcuts. Searching for text? Here's help for RegExp...

This is something that Alfred has implemented quite well https://www.alfredapp.com/remote/

A cool example of an upsell that I'd never thought of/seen before!

Is this new or simply badly advertised? If I had known about this feature I would have adopted Alfred way earlier.

What do you use it for? I use Alfred, but haven't delved deeply enough into workflows. I just find it better than spotlight for the default use case.

But I am very interesting to know what I might be missing.

I use Alfred as a Spotlight replacement and as a clipboard history manager mostly. I don't use remote because I haven't delved deeply into it like you said. It's one of those "one of these weekends when I have time" and I've been telling myself this for years at this point.

Lol I use Alfred daily, if not every 10 seconds, and I didn't know about that.

There's also Better Touch Tool Remote.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/btt-remote-mouse-trackpad/id...

would love for mature projects to get more attention on this: https://community.kde.org/KDEConnect#What_is_KDE_Connect.3F

kde connectg has the network and permissions almost figured out (and works with gnome and other wms too)

but it is lacking almost everything yet. there is a clipboard sync module, but not a simple text share, for example.

Yeah I read this article and it seems like this should be the future of KDEConnect. It has controls for multimedia but these shortcuts would be fun.

Side note, I listen to music on my laptop a lot. All the sudden the music would stop, I'd say, "Damn wifi." Then half a second later my phone would ring and I'd have a conversation. When I hung up the phone music started again. This happened probably 5 times before I realized KDEConnect was pausing the music (and movies) when my phone rang and resuming them when I was done. Tons of potential with this app. Wish I knew how to program.

https://cgit.kde.org/kdeconnect-kde.git

Is there an advantage to this over Unified Remote?

https://www.unifiedremote.com/

unified remote seems to focus on media and media driven commands. This can be configured to work with any program.

I love this concept. Anyone know of software (other than Dragon) that does this with voice recognition? I could see myself using context aware voice commands in my day to day! I remember seeing some talks a few years back about a guy who used the Dragon API and Python to exclusively do programming due to his carpel tunnel's being very bad.

EDIT: programmer's name is Tavis Rudd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkdfdXWYaI

It looks like it uses Windows. I made something like this a long time ago in bash, for Linux. It used a vncserver to drive the phone auxiliary display. The wonderful thing about the Linux desktop is how flexible it is.

Especially when you use things like Xinerama and Synergy to connect the different desktops.

Check out https://www.quadro.me

Cool idea and an implementation too! Might be the direction Apple could be headed, the touch bar could go away and merge with the trackpad. A track screen which can handle both taps, clicks and have a visual display.

Does anyone else remember the keyboard overlays that were used in the 80s and 90s to help users remember keyboard shortcuts? That's what this idea reminded me of.

XMouse is a free app for Android that can be used for this. You can configure buttons that run arbitrary commands over SSH.

or use something like this http://www.roccat.org/en-RO/Products/Gaming-Software/Power-G...

This looks like it could be a great add-ion to Synergy

i love this idea

So they just reinvented the toolbar on a smartphone screen. That's nice and all but the reason for the shortcuts in the first place was to not have to click the toolbar and use the keyboard, developing muscle memory and eventually not needing the cheat sheet. Like the mac touchbar, this is aimed at the casual user, not at power users.

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