Stay app – you’re hired!

By Greg Turnquist

Greg is a member of the Spring team, an author of several books on Spring Boot, conference speaker, and the lead for Spring Data JPA.

May 12, 2014

4K_work_envAs follow up to my previous article, My Software Cheapskate Days Are Behind Me, I’m proud to say I just purchased the Stay app. That app is so frickin’ wicked, it rivals Tweetbot.

I recently bought a 39″ 4K display as my monitor. Whenever I would unplug my laptop and take it elsewhere, all my windows would bunch together. Then when I would reattach after returning, they would be shoved in the corner of my Seiki monitor. I had to manually drag them back into position, resize them the way I had done before, and slowly put things back into order. After doing this for the umpteenth time, I was incredibly annoyed and began to google for a solution.

Someone on Stack Overflow made reference to this app, so I checked it out. The results were amazing. The Stay app uses the Mac’s Universal Access APIs to scan for all windows and sniff out their coordinates and dimensions. It then stuffs them into a database, with a different profile for each display configuration.

Finally, you can configure it to restore window layout every time the configuration changes. This means that when you unplug the big screen, the windows will jump to your alternate layout for just the laptop. Plug it back in, and things jump back to big screen layout. And I can already sense that when I build a 3rd profile at the Nashville JUG for the overheard, Stay will save that as well so I don’t have to rearrange anymore.

Here’s the bonus. You can pick whatever shortcut you want to direct Stay to catalog the positions of all your windows, and when to restore positions. Only when I completely rearrange everything do I tap that function. Most of the time, it stays out of my way, and just does one, simple thing. Put the windows where I had them last. THAT is worth a measly $15.

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *