mfseeker Posted February 14, 2009 Report Share Posted February 14, 2009 I know this is a big topic, but, thanks to Terry, I have been investigating PowerPro. What incredible flexibility! It is overwhelming at first. Before I go too much further, I would like to know whether I am going to get into peculiar situations because I am trying to use both MEP and PowerPro. What determines the order of activation precedence between PowerPro and MEP? Is it simply a matter of which program stars first? Do both absorb the activating event (such as a hot-key or window activation), or do they pass the activation through to the other program? Do the different sorts of activation event exhibit the same precedence behaviour? "Restore Keyboard and Mouse Hooks" will force MEP to have precedence for keyboard and mouse events. Does that command work to give priority to MEP over PowerPro? Is it always necessary, if that is what you want? Is there any way of reversing the precedence of the two programs? What about non-keyboard/mouse activations? Do they establish precedence differently? Of course, I could do a whole bunch of tests to answer these questions, but if someone already knows the answers, I would just as soon spend my time trying to gain a minimal mastery of PowerPro. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
terrypin Posted February 14, 2009 Report Share Posted February 14, 2009 I know this is a big topic, but, thanks to Terry, I have been investigating PowerPro. What incredible flexibility! It is overwhelming at first. Before I go too much further, I would like to know whether I am going to get into peculiar situations because I am trying to use both MEP and PowerPro. What determines the order of activation precedence between PowerPro and MEP? Is it simply a matter of which program stars first? Do both absorb the activating event (such as a hot-key or window activation), or do they pass the activation through to the other program? Do the different sorts of activation event exhibit the same precedence behaviour? "Restore Keyboard and Mouse Hooks" will force MEP to have precedence for keyboard and mouse events. Does that command work to give priority to MEP over PowerPro? Is it always necessary, if that is what you want? Is there any way of reversing the precedence of the two programs? What about non-keyboard/mouse activations? Do they establish precedence differently? Of course, I could do a whole bunch of tests to answer these questions, but if someone already knows the answers, I would just as soon spend my time trying to gain a minimal mastery of PowerPro. I suppose we'd better keep this short, as it's not only OT but it's discussing what could be regarded as a competitive product! As you probably saw from my recent reply to Paul, I'm not using PowerPro but its long since obsolete predecessor, Stiletto. However, I've never had any serious conflict problems. The two programs seem to co-exist well. The most obvious restriction of course is to ensure unique activations. So before assigning a hotkey in ME I also have to check existing Stiletto assignments. In fact I'm currently fretting about whether I need both programs! I've used Stiletto for nearly 12 years and so have quite a big investment in it. And in theory I'm pretty sure that I could do everything that ME does for me in Stiletto, but in practice it's much easier to write a macro with ME (3 or Pro) than with Stiletto. For a non-programmer like me anyway. And I assume the same would apply to PowerPro. Right now I'm seriously considering whether I can do the reverse, i.e. get rid of Stiletto by replicating all remaining macros etc in ME Pro. But one major attraction is the typical Stiletto UI. Apart from hotkeys, mouse movements, 'macrophrases' (equivalent to ME shortkeys), window openings etc, I can pull down a 'bar' of Stiletto menus (either pop-up or 'pinned') by simply moving my mouse cursor oven a chosen section of screen edge, in my case the middle part of the top edge. I used to have a dozen individual buttons in that bar, now down to 5 as you see here. Each of them can have 3 independent sections, activated respectively by clicking with the left, middle or right mouse button. (The screenshot shows the situation when my mouse cursor is hovering over the 5th button.) So, with 12 buttons, I could pull down 36 menus, each with as many items as I liked (restricted in practice by how many I could see conveniently on the screen). I haven't yet become sufficiently confident with ME Pro to be sure, but I reckon I can get close to that ease of use. Apart perhaps from those nice little coloured buttons and the L/M/R flexibility. Another factor, of course, is reliabilty. In fairness, I have to say I found Stiletto extremely robust and largely bug free. Recent experience with ME Pro hasn't been so good. Some things I'd like to be able to rely on, like Window Title activation, are still unpredictable, although I'm sure ISS are working hard to fix these. Turning from generalities to your specific questions, as a practical test of your first four points above I temporarily changed my ME Pro shortkey prefix from ## to =. which is what I use for 'macrophrases' in Stiletto. Then I set things up so that typing '=my' should deliver 'C:\Docs' in ME Pro (my alias for My Documents) , and 'Stiletto' in Stiletto. On then typing that a few times into my text editor I got these results: C:Sti\lettoDocs CStilet:to\Docs StilettoC:\Docs C:Sti\lettoDocs So it's clearly a race resulting in an inconsistent mixture. Typing immediately after using Restore Keyboard and Mouse Hooks made no difference. Maybe Paul can respond further about PowerPro. Either here or by PM! -- Terry, East Grinstead, UK Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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