Background: I am freelance audio engineer in LA, working in the TV and Film industry. KM macros that I use for running my audio software (Pro Tools, Soundminer, RX, Excel etc.). I absolutely love it. It has completely overhauled my workflow and made me much more efficient. It is really a joy to use.
Here is my issue. I freelance a lot. All over town. There are tons of studios I am in and out of, ones almost daily. What I want to do is find a way to make my KM macros portable. I don’t have admin privileges at these places and most have strict IT/engineering dept governing what can and can’t be installed. So I’d like a solution that is a seemless and plug n play as possible.
I have not tried this because all of my macs have KM installed. But is it possible to run it off of a thumb drive without installing it onto the computer? I feel like at one point I had to give KM accessibility rights in System Preferences. But I can’t seem to find that now. I could be thinking of something else.
My other idea would be to see if it is possible to use my Macbook Pro as a portable KM engine. Maybe I could plug in my MBP to the computer via a USB cable and somehow fire my macros from the MBP and it would send them other to the other mac as bare keyboard commands and mouse movements. I doubt this is possible but an idea I wanted to throw out there.
Any ideas for what I’m trying to accomplish? I hoping the thumb drive will work, I just haven’t been able to test it out yet. The other thing I need to consider is some places are still on 10.8.5 so I would need to run KM 6 at those places and KM 7 at home. If it is easier to just run 6 only, that is fine too.
Thoughts? I really appreciate your feedback.
Yes, you need to give Keyboard Maestro and Keyboard Maestro Engine accessibility permissions, so without admin permissions you are not going to be able to use Keyboard Maestro very effectively at all.
On top of that you have the issue of preferences - you would have to put your preferences in, and then remove them later. And if the user themselves might already be using Keyboard Maestro, then you have to deal with that, quitting the existing Keyboard Maestro, moving the existing preferences out of the way, putting your preferences in, and the reversing the process at the end.
The latter you can work something up to solve (perhaps a script to install and remove your preferences that you run manually), but the former is I think insurmountable without the admin password.
I am looking for the same solution Dan describes above. My reply is just to get notified is there will be solutions put here in the future.
Just FYI, at the bottom of the topic is a Tracking configuration which lets you control when you'll be notified.
Hey Dan and Danny,
Peter is not going to make a portable version of Keyboard Maestro. There just isn’t enough demand to make it worth his time.
That said:
If you guys want to experiment with running from a flash drive and using symlinks on the client-system to point to the relevant files and folders, I’m willing to advise and perhaps write scripts to install/uninstall the symlinks.
My thought is to put all the files on the flash drive and symlink them to the locations Keyboard Maestro expects on the client machine.
These would be the relevant files/folders:
~/Library/Application Support/Keyboard Maestro
~/Library/Preferences/com.stairways.keyboardmaestro.editor.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.stairways.keyboardmaestro.engine.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.stairways.keyboardmaestro.plist
The app would be run from the flash drive.
The biggest concern here is whether or not the OSX preferences manager will permit the use of symlinks (or aliases) for the preference files. (The prefs manager is a bit flakey.)
If not then we’ll have to copy the real files. That presents difficulties IF the client machine already has Keyboard Maestro installed but not insurmountable ones.
You’ll also have to be careful to NOT pull the flash drive while Keyboard Maestro is running.
So, it’s up to you guys.
-Chris
Thanks Chris for your reply. Unfortunately the computers i work on as a freelancer are blocked for any installation i like to be. Placing file onto the system is not allowed. The Keyboard Maestro system that Chris like to have must be running from I flash drive without any installation or files that need to be copied to the system. I think we need think an other way. For me a keyboard buffer output would be enough. Maybe that doesn’t need administration rights to get into the keyboard buffer.
Without accessibility, Keyboard Maestro is quite limited. A few actions will work, but not many.
Even then, depending on the Gatekeeper settings, you may not even be able to run the application.
And if you did, it would certainly write files to the harddisk (such as logs).
So its unlikely to work in such a locked down environment.