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Apple once rejected an app of mine for being "useless". App review even called me to tell me my app is useless and will not be approved to the Mac App Store. ~
by fifafu 3y ago
Apple once rejected an app of mine for being "useless". App review even called me to tell me my app is useless and will not be approved to the Mac App Store.
~12 years later thousands of people have used that little useless app
(KeyboardCleanTool, a very small free app to block all keyboard / touch bar input). People have used that app in ways I'd never have imagined (e.g. letting toddlers hack on their keyboards or letting their cats sleep on the laptop).
What is useful or not is really subjective.
- alin23 3y agoThanks for KeyboardCleanTool! I’ve used it for years, and it inspired me to add a similar function called Cleaning Mode in my Lunar app: https://lunar.fyi/shortcuts#cleaning-mode https://lunar.fyi/shortcuts#cleaning-mode I needed the MacBook screen and monitors to be completely black while cleaning so I can see the dust that would result in scratches if cleaned with a cloth. I also needed the trackpad to be disabled and an easy to press key combo to turn off cleaning mode (I arrived on spamming the Command key at least 8 times as a combo, hard to accidentally press, easy to remember) I’m always annoyed by Apple’s practices in app review, why would they decide for users what is useful and what isn’t? Not to mention the scams that pass review and are left to live in the App Store for months.
- albertzeyer 3y agoOh interesting, I wrote something very similar: https://github.com/albertz/mac-suppress-mouse-keyboard https://github.com/albertz/mac-suppress-mouse-keyboard It also blocks mouse presses. The only way to unblock is to type in a special sequence of letters on the keyboard. But an on-screen display will tell you what to type. It was mostly for my toddler.
- coopierez 3y agoFunny you should mention, I just needed to clean my keyboard yesterday and I was looking for a way to disable my keyboard without turning off my PC. Thanks for your app!
- john-tells-all 3y agoPfft I used your "useless" app! I wanted to clean the keyboard and the app lets me do that without shutting the computer down. Very happy! Thanks.
- alsetmusic 3y agoI’m aware of your app. Seems pretty brilliant to me. My mother accidentally turned on our computer (Mac IIsi) when cleaning while I was a kid. I successfully turned that into the justification for why we needed the After Dark screensaver. Flying toasters soon graced my screen. Ah, nostalgia…
- bGl2YW5j 3y agoI've benefitted from your app! Thank you for the awesome anecdote.
- mysterydip 3y agohow did you get it approved?
- forgotmypw17 3y agoIt is published outside of the apple app store.
- waprin 3y agoYet multiple times I’ve seen people on this site defend Apples approval process as a good thing since they get such a great curated experience as a consumer. But here’s the thing - you don’t know what you’re missing because you never see it. If this persons idea was for iPhone instead of macOS it would never benefit those thousands of users that it did. And - I’m going to put this bluntly while trying not to be too rude - Apple does not assign the best of the best to their App Store approval process. The experience is rife with reviewers who seem to have never looked at your app and are incapable of communicating in English outside the scope of auto form responses. Imagine the worst call center experience you’ve ever had as a customer - now you get that experience after having put hundreds or thousands of hours into a project and in some cases , a business of yours. And your concerns are a speck of dust to this trillion dollar company. And let’s be real - you can’t seriously make a mobile app and ignore iPhones. It’s not a pure monopoly but they effectively have the leverage of one. It’s unimaginable to me that on a site called hacker news I would see support for such incredibly antagonistic behavior towards developers that Apple exhibits but unfortunately I have multiple times so I hope this persons brilliant keyboard app that has helped so many people serves as one of the many many examples as to how Apples broken App Store process hurts developers and hurts consumers and benefits absolutely nobody. I haven’t even touched upon the fact that you have to pay $99/year and THIRTY percent of revenue for the privilege of this experience. The simple solution is a legal mandate to allow third party app stores. It’s fine if Apple wants the official rails to be highly curated but there simply must be an off-ramp. We are so lucky that European regulators have some sense here.
- wruza 3y agoThe missing out is real, but it is still a tradeoff. I’d prefer the world where we could have both all the reasonable apps and no spyware/pii-ransomware nonsense in app stores. But we only have this one and have to share it. You don’t see it as a tradeoff, that’s okay. But voting to ruin the experience that people actually liked for decades… that’s hard to understand.
- orangecat 3y agoI've wanted that for years, thank you! Apparently nobody at Apple has a cat.
- ok_dad 3y agoCat like typing detected http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/ http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense/
- jerrysievert 3y agoWhen I desperately needed to clean my keyboard, I was searching for how best to clean a MacBook keyboard. Your app kept coming up and I kept laughing it off thinking, “yeah, how can an app clean the keyboard, will it fake shake it until it’s clean?” It wasn’t until about 10 searches later I found a decent article about the best way to clean your keyboard, with a shout out to your app for being able to lock the keyboard. Finally, it clicked and I downloaded it - quite useful for a “useless” app - thanks for making it and maintaining it!
- foundart 3y agoI turn my laptop off to clean it and avoid the power button while doing the cleaning. Was this not an option for you?
- jrmg 3y agoRecent Apple laptops switch on if _any_ of the keys are pressed.
- alpaca128 3y agoOr if you open the lid.
- foundart 3y agoYikes! TIL that with Apple Silicon it is impossible to stop the computer from auto-booting on lid open or key press. There was an nvram hack that worked for Intel machines but it has no effect now. What a "feature." I've added a user account "Clean" and will do cleaning after locking the screen while logged into that account. If I happen to disable its login via failed logins due to keypresses while cleaning, I can switch back to my normal account and reset it.
- jerrysievert 3y agothere are a few apps that I don't want to quit any time (about once every 2 weeks) that I want to clean my laptop keyboard. currently, I'm fighting slack to make sure it doesn't update again.
- luigi23 3y agoIt wasnt useless, it was their way of telling ‘not suitable for average user because they can lock themselves in and were gonna take the heat’
- Isthatablackgsd 3y agoI love your app! It is perfect for my MBA M1. I was annoyed there wasn't an option to temporarily disable the keyboard for cleaning. I found your app through brew.
- jbaber 3y agoIn Linux, I switch to a vty (ctrl-alt-f4) and don't log into it when I want to disable the keyboard.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI would think in most cases some sort of lock would be fine - whether that's switching to a getty, calling xscreensaver/gnome-screensaver/whatever, or whatever your platform's equivalent is.
- imp0cat 3y agoThis. I just lock the machine and have a go at it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Quiark 3y agoTBH I just switch to the lock screen if I need that
- albertzeyer 3y agoWe did some video meetings (or online sport sessions) during corona, and our toddler always wanted to play around with the computer.
- knlam 3y agoI will save this comment whenever someone defend the apple wallgarden
- willi59549879 3y agoi refuse to call apple a walled garden. To me it is plainly a prison, doesn't play well with anything outside