Holy crap.

All of a sudden I think I'm ready to release a beta of VoodooNetKey. I was working on some code for the last little feature I wanted to add, and then bang- it all of a sudden started working and I didn't even realize it. Cocoa rules.

Anyway, if you are on Mac OS X 10.2, and want to give it a whirl, you can download it right here. I'll probably clean it up a little bit more before I post the beta up on VersionTracker, but there it is for now. I'm sure there are still bugs (it's beta, right?) and probably a memory leak or two.

Oh yea- what is it? VoodooNetKey is an application that responds to hot keys- by default it's set up to use command-f11 and command-option-f11. When the first one is pressed, it brings the window forward (screen shot) with a little input box where you can type in search terms. If you have the pref set, it'll also copy selected text in whatever app you are in, and paste it right in the app. You can then select where you want to search from a pull down (which you can modify and add to...).

The second hot key will do the same as the first, except it'll skip the whole "bring the window to the front" bit and just go straight to whatever search engine you use. I've set up my mouse so that whenever I hit one of the extra buttons, it sends a command-option-f11, and then VoodooNetKey does it's magic.

So it's actually useful too :)

A couple of friends have been using it, and they really like it too- one even bought a copy already! (Thanks Andy!)

Oh yea, did I mention it has history with autocomplete? Yea- it's got history with autocompletion in it too.

Anyway, there are other options, like you can change the hotkeys, and if you want you can just type www.somewhere.com when the window comes up and hit command-l and it'll open up that url... it'll also notice when you have a url in the clipboard (if it starts with http) and then try and automagicly go to that url... so if you read email with mutt like me, you can just highlight it, hit the magic key, and VoodooNetKey does it's magic. It'll even try and clean up nasty line wrapping and getting rid of extra chars that shouldn't be there.

Cool, eh? Hopefully I'll get it all done as soon as I get back from my trip to California later this week so I can start on another app that'll probably make me a little bit of money too. Speaking of which, I'm thinking of charging 9.95 for VoodooNetKey... or maybe 7.95 (I'll have to give Andy back 2 bucks in that case :). If you try it out, and you think it's worth one or the other, let me know.