Hi @peternlewis ,
The iOS app has now stopped working.
Up until today, I used it every day.
Please update the iOS app. I will even pay for the update.
Sincerely,
Jim
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Keyboard Maestro Control has not been updated in a long time because working on the iOS app and dealing with Apple's review process and zillions of icons sucks the life out of me.
I find working on the iOS version intolerably painful. It is simultaneously the worst of both worlds, being a small system, but requiring a hundred different icons sizes, and a hundred difference screen sizes, but not actually handling resizing windows.
Other people cope, I just find the tedium and the uncertainty and the weird errors and the inconsistent answers and the ever looming threat of just plain out rejecting the app to be a very stressful experience. I will no doubt one day try to get it updated again.
Keyboard Maestro 8 added the Remote Trigger URL which would probably be a better solution that Keyboard Maestro Control in most every case anyway.
Thanks for your understanding,
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As I have offered before, I will help.
I am sure that I can make zillions of icons.
And I have experience submitting masters to Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony. Trust me, Apple can't be as bad.
Or, I am willing to donate money to the cause. I'll go up to $200 to get the iOS app working again.
Remote Triggers may work for some. I have over 500 macros. I don't use all of them remotely all of the time, but having to use Remote Triggers is my idea of hell, when the iOS just automatically shows all of my macros in it.
I'm begging you, my friend.
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Hey Jim,
You look miserable. I can feel your pain when I read your post. 
If you have time (since you said you can make the zillions of icons), you might try out the apps mentioned here:
It's very easy to make 500 buttons for the 500 KM macros if you want. The buttons are fairly customizable, and they work instantly to trigger the KM macros.
As I said in that post, I use Touch Portal. We can create up to 110 buttons per page and unlimited pages.
I'm sorry Jim.
It's not a question of money, it's a question of will. I simply do not have the energy to spend on trying to update Keyboard Maestro Control knowing full well that whatever I do Apple will throw up a bunch of meaningless blocks in the path. Not blocks about security, or privacy, but just random blocks related to pointless details of the implementation. Icons is just an example, it would be screenshots, or layout, or the right or wrong text or link somewhere, or who knows whatever crap the App Review guy decides to focus on that day. And I find it exceptionally hard to justify spending my effort on Keyboard Maestro Control knowing it might all be wasted, or I may have to spend an unknown and excessive amount of further effort jumping through Apple’s hoops.
If there was a reasonable method for sideloading, so I could just host the app myself, I'd probably do it. But I have no inclination to spend my efforts fighting App Review over trivialities.
Probably this comes from the fact that I've been distributing apps online for decades before Apple even had an app store.
What if I handle the submission? I know how to jump through bureaucratic hoops. I am great at breaking through meaningless blocks. That would remove the burden of spent energy on your part.
If you don't want me to use your app store account, I'd be happy to make my own and submit the app through it. All I would need is the working app. I will get it through Apple's submission process. I have an abundance of energy for such. Trust me, I've dealt with Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony—I am not frightened by any App Review Guy.
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I'm not opposed to it.
I'd rather start with Peter's code and improve/maintain it. All with his permission, of course.
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I pondered your proposal, but no. Keyboard Maestro Control is too heavily linked to Keyboard Maestro to make it reasonable to split off. There is also a lot of potential for confusion from users.
I've also looked again at the code, and its clear it would require a significant amount of work to bring it up to date, both on the UI side, and on the networking side where the code used is now deprecated.
The only way forward is either:
- I implement a proper, public API which would then allow third parties such as yourself to implement your own solutions.
- Or, Apple allows side-loading, in which case I may attempt to update Keyboard Maestro Control, knowing at the least my work will not be wasted even if Apple complains about who knows what.
I'm afraid neither is particularly likely.
I still do want an iOS app, though Keyboard Maestro Control never really matched the sort of macro palette on iOS that I would like to see. Currently, other better iOS apps with Remote Triggers are a lot closer to what I wanted to build than Keyboard Maestro Control ever was. So it is possible I may revisit this some day.
Sorry this is not the answer you want.
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A practical way forward is to consider what other iOS "apps" can fill the gap. Alfred Remote, for example?
"Apps" in quotes as it might be web triggers, driven by Shortcuts, for example. Or it might be MetaGrid - which we know works.
I do believe it is possible to build an ecosystem of iOS / iPad OS / HomePod / Watch / Pi etc driving Keyboard Maestro.
Happy to try all those out - if this were a concerted effort by others in addition to me.
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I could try some out
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Was a public API ever implemented and are there now any ways -- a year and a half later -- to trigger KM macros?
It's really criminal. so much preferred the old wild west.
If you are using the Remote trigger, then there is no API needed, it is a simple URL, and you can access that URL with anything (eg the curl command line tool) to trigger the macro.
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I know this is an old thread, but I've been trying to excise TextExpander (and it's ridiculously high priced subscription fee) for quite a long time now. I'd love to be able to–at the very least–use the Text expansion shortcuts I've built in Keyboard Maestro on macOS on my iPhone. While you can do very basic text expansions using iOS's built-in "Text Replacements" feature, it can't do things like expand the current date/time, for example, which is something I do about 50 times a day on both my Mac and iOS devices.
While it would certainly be nice for there to be a full featured adaptation of KM on iOS, I can understand the hesitance in committing to such a task, if only because it's so annoying to deal with Apple's App Review process, let alone the difficulty of adapting such a deep app to much more limited mobile OS.
That said, I'd like to submit a request that consideration be given for developing an iOS version that only focuses on a small subset of KM's functionality, namely text expansions, so that users don't have to maintain redundant text expansion utilities across platforms. Ideally it would run as an iOS custom keyboard, much like how Textexpander or Rocket Typist works.
I know it's a long shot, but I figure it couldn't hurt just tp put the idea out there. The inability to use my KM text expansions has long frustrated me, even back when the KM IOS app was still supported.