Charmstone

What makes Charmstone so great

How many times do you change which app has focus in a day? You might be surprised if you kept track of it. Before building this, I used to use a combination of cmd+tab, Spotlight, and good old-fashioned window or dock clicking to switch and launch apps. I didn't really think that there was a problem there to solve. When you spend a lot of time using a computer, you start to notice that speeding up small parts of your flow actually lead to dramatic efficiency and performance improvements. You find out that your brain was hitting friction and having to overcome a bunch of little hurdles everywhere. Typically, it takes a lot of memorization, muscle memory, and/or customization to erase all those little hurdles.

With Charmstone, all of that memorization, muscle memory and customization overhead is miniscule; you can skip straight to efficiency. Think of the memorization technique called a memory palace where your brain can most rapidly recollect where something was placed. Combine that with only having to remember one or two modifier keys instead of a whole slew of keyboard shortcuts, and you have something brilliantly fast with practically no learning curve. Not only that, but it's surprisingly faster than hitting cmd+space and typing the first few letters of an app.

You can use the modifier+cursor movement, modifier+arrow keys, or a highly optimized trackpad gesture that is simple to perform but not so easy to accidentally trigger.

Another way I like to think of Charmstone is using your brain like a CPU accessing a cache, rather than going all the way out to RAM or disk or the net.