“Nobody wants to get caught Toobin”
Greetings, and welcome to the remote reality. This is my Zoomer. It’s a project that I’m having a lot of fun with. But luckily, it’s also very useful. Nobody wants to get caught Toobin, or end up on some kind of list. And sharing your screen? That’s an an inside joke at this point. This little box makes life easier.
And, although it is plug and play for Mac users (and takes two extra button presses for Windows users), there a few details worth looking at:
Zoom Settings - You’ll want to do all of this:
Windows Users - Like I said, two buttons for a Windows users. Press the bottom left key, then the bottom right, for the Windows layer:
See that ‘Windows Blue’ appear, instead of ‘Gun Metal Grey’? You’re firing the Windows shortcuts now, instead of Mac.
Go back to Mac by pressing bottom left, then bottom center:
There’s a green utility layer too. Skip that for now. If you’re there, go back with the Same way as we went from Windows to Mac:
For advanced users/developers:
One of my biggest challenges has been ‘true feedback’, for mute and video state. Meaning, if you mute or stop video (or vice versa) with your mouse, the color of the key is going to be backward. So….
I’ve been working on a script in Node JS that runs as a process on your Mac. It uses Apple Script to ask your computer every 3 seconds:
Is Zoom open?
Are you in a call?
Is the mic muted? Is Video Stopped?
Then, the mute and video buttons’ colors are updated with the answers.
One day this will be a full OS app, and won’t require advanced users. But alas…
There are a few steps involved to spin it up:
This is for Mac users only, and you need to be an admin to your account (not using someone else’s computer).
You need to have Node JS.
Go to ‘System Preferences’ > ‘Security & Privacy’ (or cmd + space bar, type ‘Security & Privacy’, hit enter).
Scroll down to ‘Accessibility’, and use the + sign in the lower left to add ‘Terminal’ and ‘System Events’ as apps that can control your computer, like so:
Open up ‘Terminal’ on your Mac (cmd + space bar, type in ‘terminal’, hit enter)
The following command is separated by semi colons, and will type the following:
sudo npm i @patrickgilsf/zoomer
You will be prompted for your password, type in it in.
Next, you will type:
cd node_modules/@patrickgilsf/zoomer; node zoomer
Then anytime after that, you can open up your terminal and type the same command to run. There are also a variety of ways to automate it so it does it automatically on startup as well - the world is your oyster!
Might want to keep that second command saved somewhere.
After that, Voila! You should be good to go. Let me know if you have any issues.