Exploring QuicKeys X3 Replacing Pause steps with Wait for Menu

March/April 2005 Exploring QuicKeys Wait for Menu usage (Mac OS X)

The introduction and general idea of this tutorial were covered in the March 2005 issue of TRIGGERED. This web page is meant to provide detailed instructions on how to set up the shortcuts themselves. These instructions assume you are using QuicKeys X3 running on Mac OS X 10.3 or newer.

Part 1: Premise & Preparation

The problem we're addressing is one of multi-step shortcut timing involving the loading of a web page. We want the web page to load fully before our shortcut continues on to the next step, but we want to avoid using any Pause steps. For this example we'll make a 3-step proof of concept shortcut whose techniques can be adapted to a number of uses and applications:

1. You open your web browser and type a URL into the Address field, then press the hot key designated to trigger this shortcut. QuicKeys sends a "return" key press to start your browser loading the URL.
2. QuicKeys uses a Wait for Menu step to monitor the web browser's View -> Stop Loading menu item. When this menu item becomes inactive the page has finished loading.
3. QuicKeys speaks the fact that the web page has finished loading.

Part 2: Build It

1. Open the QuicKeys editor and select User Actions -> Type Keystroke from the Create menu. Click in the Keystroke field and press your "return" key. This step is intended to tell your web browser to begin loading whatever web page address you've typed into it.

2. Now select QuicKeys -> Wait -> Wait for Menu from the Create menu. In the newly created second step of your shortcut, type "View" in the Menu field and type "Stop" in the Menu Item field. This tells QuicKeys which menu item we're interested in. Depending on your browser of choice, "Stop" may or may not be the actual menu item name. Here are a few popular web browsers, note the differences in menu item names, but also note that they all contain the word "Stop". We can key on this word alone if we like, and we will.

• Safari ... View -> Stop
• Camino ... View -> Stop Loading Page
• Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape... View -> Stop
• OmniWeb ... View -> Stop Load
• Explorer ... View -> Stop Loading

3. Click on the Details button next to the Menu Item field. This will drop a sheet window containing an "Identify by" pop-up; change this pop-up from "Name is" to "Name contains". This makes your menu item generic enough to work with almost all web browsers.

4. Configure the rest of the Wait for Menu shortcut step as follows:

• Checked: Leave this at "Don't Care" since we don't care whether or not this menu item is checked.
• Exists: Leave this at "Yes" or the shortcut will fail thinking we intended to -not- find the designated menu item.
• Enabled: Change this to "No". When a web page is loading the "Stop" item in the View menu is enabled (not grayed out). Conversely, when a page has finished loading, this menu item becomes disabled (grayed out). We want our shortcut to Wait until this menu item is grayed out (page is done loading) before continuing to the next step.
• Options: If you are using Safari*, Explorer*, or Camino* you will need to check the box named "Show menus while performing menu action".

  *Note: These browsers fail to report the state of their menu items even when properly queried through Apple's Accessibility programming interface. QuicKeys must actually open the menus to make these browsers aware of the states of their own menu items. Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape users, you don't need to check this box, your browsers behave as expected when programmatically asked about the states of their menu items.

5. Time for our third and final step in this shortcut; select QuicKeys -> Message from the Create menu. In this new Message step, check the Speak message box, check the Play sound box and choose a sound, and type "page done loading" into the text field. This step will audibly notify us when the page is fully loaded. In practice this Message step would probably not exist in a working/real-world shortcut, but it is useful here for demonstration purposes.

Give this shortcut a hot key (I used F13) scoped to whatever web browser you prefer. Name the shortcut "Speak Done Loading", save it, and you're done.

Try It

Launch your web browser of choice and type an address into the Address/Location field; something like CNN.com or FOXNEWS.com works best since those sites usually take a few seconds to load even on fast internet connections. Don't hit return/enter to start the page loading! Instead, hit your hot key (F13 in my case) to trigger our example shortcut. The first step of the shortcut presses the Return key and will start your web browser loading the desired page. Your shortcut should then pause and depending on which browser you use you may see the View menu popping open/shut every second or so. When the page is fully loaded, the conditions of the Wait step will have been met, prompting QuicKeys to continue on to its final step and speak the words "page done loading".

This is a pretty simple shortcut but the concept of using a Wait for Menu step to pause a shortcut until a web page is done loading may have escaped a lot of users. There is a lot more to the collection of Wait type shortcut steps, explore them and free yourselves from those inflexibly strict Pauses you've grown accustomed to!