Keyboard Maestro is one of those programs that I’ve heard about for a long time, but only recently started to use it.

It is also one of those apps which is difficult to explain to people who don’t use it.

Even I wasn’t sure how I would use it, and purchased it only as part of one of those “app bundles” that have become popular in the past few years.

I hope to post a series of short posts for how I use it (and other apps) as those uses become obvious to me.

~ Saying ‘yes’ repeatedly ~

I decided that I want to start syncing my iPad to my MacBook Air (which I almost always have with me) instead of my iMac, which obviously does not travel as often, or as well.

I did this by copying my “Mobile Applications” folder from my iMac to my MacBook Air using Transmit, and then adding the contents to the “~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Automatically Add to iTunes”

This lead to a number of prompts like this one:

Each one of these prompts had to be answered before the process would continue. Over, and over, and over again.

~ Enter Keyboard Maestro ~

I solved this problem by creating a “macro” in Keyboard Maestro. You can see it above, but simply put it says:

For as long as iTunes is active, press the button “Don’t Replace” every second, and don’t stop if you can’t find the button to push.

I enabled the macro, and switched over to iTunes. Sure enough, the prompt appeared, and disappeared… and appeared, and disappeared. Over and over again until it was all finished.

Why did I tell it not to stop if it didn’t find the button to push? Because sometimes it took a little longer, and sometimes a littler shorter, for it to appear. In a way, this was inefficient, since it kept running even after it was done, but the machine wasn’t doing anything else at the time, and I couldn’t use it anyway, because iTunes had to be in front for me to answer its continued prompts. ¹

n.b. Note that I had to be sure to use “Don’t” instead of “Don’t” (note the difference between ’ and ’ which is crucial to Keyboard Maestro’s success).

While it did this, I went to breakfast at a local diner. When I came back, it was finished. I switched over the Keyboard Maestro, disabled the macro, and went into iTunes.

And just like that, my computer worked for me, instead of me having to work for my computer.