Sorry - I meant ctrl-H and ctrl-opt-H...

Hi there,

I'm coming to this thread very late, but I find it interesting because I too use Spark as my go-to hotkey app, and have done for years. It still works great, even on Lion. I just thought you might like to know that Spark has built in "Hide foreground" and "Hide others" actions : no need for Applescript or anything similar. It's global (if you want it to be) so it works in ANY app, and plus, it's much faster than Applescript.

In Spark's main window, just dbl-click "Application" in the sidebar, and in the slide-dwon sheet that appears, drop down the Action menu. There you'll find the commands. I've set cmd-H and cmd-opt-H as my hotkeys. It works an absolute treat.

cheers,
Ric

It would be fantastic to be able to set global hotkeys to jump to specific tabs in Chrome. My first 3 tabs in Chrome are Personal Gmail, Work Gmail, and FogBugz. I'd love the ability to jump directly to one of those three using a keyboard shortcut.

It seems to me that it should be possible to modify the application toggle script to add a "command-1" sent to the app once it displays. That would solve the problem for me. It seems trivially easy, but my experience is that things that seem like easy changes rarely are.

I'm trying to use variations of:

tell application "System Events" to keystroke "1" using command down

in various spots in the script, but in testing it doesn't ever seem to respond by switching the active tab.

Any chance someone reading this would be able to help me with how to do this?

Seriously Brett, this is all kinds of awesome. This is like the umpteenth time I've wished for a feature of some kind, only to have it solved by what is for you, merely a "quick tip".

Final solution. Don't know whether this is better than other solutions. I guess it is one way to do it ...

set appName to "Safari"
set alreadyLaunched to false

tell application "System Events"
    if not (exists process appName) then
        set alreadyLaunched to false
    else
        set alreadyLaunched to true
    end if
    set frontmostApp to name of the first process whose frontmost is true
end tell

if alreadyLaunched is false then
    tell application appName to launch
else if alreadyLaunched is true then
    if frontmostApp is equal to appName then
        tell application "System Events" to set visible of process appName to false
    else
        tell application appName to activate
    end if
end if

Interesting problem. The solution is a bit awkward, but I got it working. (Launch By Creator or Identifier )

set appName to bundle identifier of (info for (path to application "Mail"))

This is a very weird bug. Seems like it just doesn't want to work inside the
System Events tell. If you do the following it works. It's kinda ugly but I
think it's because if you do a tell inside another tell then the second
goes through the first. So in the original you're telling System Events to
tell Mail to activate.

set appName to "Mail"
set startIt to false
tell application "System Events"
  if not (exists process appName) then
    set startIt to true
  else if frontmost of process appName then
    set visible of process appName to false
  else
    set frontmost of process appName to true
  end if
end tell
if startIt then
  tell application appName to activate
end if

But what's even more weird is that this works,

set appName to "Mail"
set startIt to false
tell application "System Events"
    if not (exists process appName) then
        tell application "Mail" to activate
    else if frontmost of process appName then
        set visible of process appName to false
    else
        set frontmost of process appName to true
    end if
end tell
if startIt then
    tell application appName to activate
end if

but this does not work as you probably already know,

set appName to "Mail"

tell application "System Events"
  if not (exists process appName) then
    tell application appName to activate
  else if frontmost of process appName then
    set visible of process appName to false
  else
    set frontmost of process appName to true
  end if
end tell

Also you can use exists instead of name of every
process ...