I am about 1/2 way through David’s video on the controlled the StreamDeck using Better Touch Tool. Since I have BetterTouchTool (BTT) and a StreamDeck XL (SD), i thought…why not? And so it begins.
Herein my first experiment. I’m sure many folks here are much further along on their exploration than I, so please jump in with suggestions and advice! (Yes, I know there is a BTT community as well, but I haven’t seem much there about the SD as of yet, and anyway here is where I hang out, so…)
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Like I suspect most people with an SD, I have a number of profiles set up, each activated by the SD software when a particular application is active, and one more “generic” profile used when none of those applications is active.
One of my bugaboos with the SD software is that, as far as I have been able to determine, there isn’t a way to have one profile load a configuration from another. In other words, there are some buttons that I want set up the same way on every profile, while others are application specific. Ideally I could create a set of these more general buttons and then have every other profile load those buttons. Since that doesn’t seem to be an option, I created a profile with these ‘universal” buttons, which I then select, duplicate, and rename when I want to create a new profile, and then add in the application specific buttons to the new profile. However, unlike loading a “sub profile,” if you will, if I want to change the operation of one of these universal buttons later, I need to go into each profile and make the change one by one.
I thought perhaps with BTT I could emulate my application-specific buttons and create a universal set as well.
My experiment to see how this might work in BTT ran thusly:
- Under “All Apps”: I created a button assigned to Row 1 Column 1 (R1C1), Just a button, green in color. No actions assigned for this test run.
- Restarted BTT to let it take over the SD. Green button appears in R1C1. Nice.
- Under my “Finder” app specific BTT settings, created a button assigned to R2C1, colored red. Switched to Finder. The green button remained in R1C1, and now the red button appeared in R2C1. Switched to Safari. Green button still in R1C1; red button gone from R2C2. Really nice. Seems to work the way I wanted.
- What happens if I dont’t want the “universal” buttons for a specific app? Does application specific settings override the All Apps settings? Well…
- Under the “Finder” specific settings, create a button assigned to R1C1. Color this one blue.
- Switch to Finder. Now, the red button appears in R2C1 as expected. But, the original green button is still in R1C1. Where’s my blue button from the Finder specific configuration?
- Interesting. In the bottom right hand corner of the SD (R4C8) its a rightward pointing arrow. I didn’t create that!
- Click it. Now I have my Finder-specific blue button in R1C1 replacing the All Apps green button. Sort of OK.
- But, my Finder specific red button that was in R2C1 is gone! And, now there’s a new leftward pointing arrow in R4C7. Click that, and back to the green R1C1 and red R2C2.
I bit curious, and not exactly what I expected or was hoping for. It seems that at this point, at least, you can create “universal” buttons in All Apps and add in more buttons that are app specific as well, but the behavior if an app specific setting conflicts with an All Apps setting is not intuitive or, at least for me, useful.
Since this part of BTT is still in beta, this may or may not change, and I expect some glitchiness in beta software. Still, pretty impressive what my first experiments have indicated are possible in BTT.
Next experiment: What if I create a folder and put some buttons in there? I’m not sure what behavior to expect, so I will experiment with that. In the SD software, I do create folders, which with the SD software allow you to click a button to have a new configuration come up, and I use that for example to have a button on most profiles where I can click that button have have a full array of window positioning options. I wonder if folders is the way to reproduce that behavior, or do I need to use the custom trigger pseudo-apps as described in the video to do this?
I hope there are some other folks exploring the SD+BTT warren who can chime in!