On booting into OS X, you may find it irritating that Apptivate’s “Add Item” window comes up as default without you clicking on it. Stop the Add Item window from appearing on login Here’s a few tricks and tips for tweaking Apptivate and making it exactly how you’d like it: 1. So, hitting your Hotkey combination for Wikipedia for instance, will both launch your web browser and navigate to Wikipedia.Īpptivate’s simple interface belies the surprising depth of features which it contains and there’s a whole host of uses you can put the app to.
For instance, while Ctrl + m launches Mail on my Mac, I use the combination of Ctrl and the Cmd (option) key plus a letter to denote a website: therefore, to navigate Safari to Make Tech Easier, I hold down three keys, Ctrl Cmd and m.Īnother bonus of using this method to launch your bookmarks is that your web browser need not be running.
Though you are free to use whichever combination of keys you wish for launching bookmarks, it often helps to have a system. Then you should navigate to your bookmarks, as shown in the screenshot below and assign the bookmark a Hotkey. Once you have your websites ready, click on the Apptivate Menu Bar icon once more and then ‘Add Item’. Bear in mind that if you have several websites beginning with the same letter then you may have to get creative with which key you use as Hotkey. You can do this as many times as you like for whichever websites you feel that you will visit most often. Navigate to your chosen website within Safari and drag the favicon into your previously created Apptivate bookmark folder.
First open a new Finder window and create a folder somewhere to house your Apptivate bookmarks – I have created a folder named Apptivate Bookmarks in my Documents folder, as shown below. I shall be using Safari in this example, but any web browser should work fine so long as it’s set as OS X’s default web browser. This app can also be used to navigate instantly to selected bookmarks too. Once you’re used to this method of launching and navigating, you should find that you can do so with great speed.Īpptivate is not limited to launching only applications. For instance, since Ctrl + m launches Mail and Ctrl + s launches Safari, moving between the two can be achieved without taking my fingers off the keyboard. As you can see in the screenshot below, I have chosen to add the ‘ctrl’ and ‘s’ keys simultaneously to launch Safari.Įach application can be added in this way and the Hotkeys can also be used to navigate within apps themselves once launched. Clicking on, for example, Safari, will then bring up the Hotkey sequence dialog.
This will bring you to your Mac’s Applications folder, as shown in the above screenshot. To begin, click on the Apptivate Menu Bar icon and then ‘Add Item’. Once installed, Apptivate will sit unobtrusively in your Mac’s Menu Bar and we can begin adding applications! Adding Applications To ApptivateĪdding applications to Apptivate and assigning them a Hotkey is very easy and it shouldn’t take too long to have all your major programs added.
Read on to learn more about using Apptivate.įirst head over to the Apptivate website and download Apptivate. There’s a few ways to go about this, but overall, I believe Apptivate fits the bill due to its low cost, small memory footprint and lightweight, intuitive interface.