CtrlAltItsNeat!

I wrote my first Cocoa app for OS X a few months back when everyone (including me) thought Check Point was buying my company. Silly me.

The result is this nifty little program CtrlAltItsNeat. What's it do? Pretty simple, when you hit opt-cmd-delete on the keyboard, it pops up a little dialog that looks like this:

Look familiar? It should, it's essentially the same dialog that Windows pops up when you hit the ctrl-alt-delete key combo. What's the point? I hated having to move the mouse pointer down into the screen corner to do screen locks, I'm a UNIX guy and I like to use keyboard chords when possible to do simple tasks fast. Tasks like locking the screen, which is what this program does if you follow the initial chord up with the Enter key.

There are a few caveats with this program. First, it's a Universal app, so it should work on PPC and x86 Macs just fine. Second, I haven't implemented preferences yet, so you're stuck with the default hotkey chord to activate the dialog. Yes I know, lame.

I've thought of some obvious improvements that could made, such as assigning the buttons to any app or (possibly) system function, but for what it does it works well. I'm also thinking about open sourcing it, although I'd have to talk to Sourcefire legal before I could do anything like that. For now I'm just going to post it up where people can get at it and if I get some requests for improvements, I'll be happy to continue to release them for free for the time being.

Enjoy!

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