Many Tricks
Apple ships a remote control with most of their computers. With only six buttons the Apple Remote is the ultimate in simple sophistication. The standard functionality, however, is limited to controlling just a couple of applications. Sofa Control breaks this limit. With Sofa Control you are able to control any application on your Mac and trigger whatever actions you like.
Now you might be wondering why we would recommend an application we’re not officially affiliated with. Here’s why: About a year ago, Sofa Control’s head developer, Martin Kahr, did something Apple forgot to do: He provided a framework named Remote Control Wrapper that made it ridiculously easy for 3rd-party applications to interface with the Apple Remote. So when we started thinking about adding remote control support to yFlicks, the decision to use Martin’s framework was more or less a no-brainer. It was rock-solid, it was elegant, and it was free.
However, we encountered one issue that — in our humble opinion — was worth fixing: There wasn’t any mechanism for managing situations where several applications using Martin’s framework would strive for access to the remote control. When we contacted Martin about this, we were delighted by his open-minded response and his willingness to work this out.
And that’s what we did. Together, we came up with a beautiful solution for this kind of race condition. And this solution doesn’t even require any additional work from 3rd-party developers. They just have to update their applications to the newest Remote Control Wrapper version.
Yesterday, Martin released said version, along with Sofa Control 2.1, which — hardly surprisingly — uses the Remote Control Wrapper framework, too. So now you can have yFlicks and Sofa Control work seamlessly together, because actually, that new Remote Control Wrapper version has been built into yFlicks since yFlicks 2.0.