I'm trying to study music theory and I need a simple series of tasks to be automated to avoid wasting time on repetitive actions. That's what the Shortcuts app is for, but the actions it comes with are either severely mislabeled, or just don't work. I tried to ask for this in some regular forums and nobody could give me a simple answer, so I figured this is something that developers probably know.
I just need four PDFs to open in Preview, their windows moved to one of my monitors, and then be tiled in four equal sizes, with the order determined by me. Sounds easy, doesn't it? But I've been trying to accomplish this for over a year in Shortcuts and even Automator, but at best I can get halfway there.
I've also noticed that the Shortcuts I had prepared are running awfully slow. I'm on a Mac Studio M1 Ultra, and these PDFs are less than 10 MB each, three of them are less than 5 MB. These used to open almost instantly, but now the first one opens, then 3-5 seconds later the next one opens and so on.
As for the window tiling, at best it's tiling three of the windows correctly, but the other one that should tile on the top left, doesn't resize to the quarter of the screen. But worst of all, they are supposed to move to one of the monitors and do the tiling there, but they all open and tile on the main monitor.
So this is one I started today from scratch:
Logically speaking, this should work. But either I'm not following the logic with which Shortcuts was designed, or Shortcuts just doesn't work very well. I'm hoping it's just that I don't follow the logic, but the help is not very helpful. It's rather scant, and other than that, I can't find something that will give me more information about how it works. I'm on the current version of Sonoma, but this was the same in the previous macOS. I doubt it changed at all in Sequoia.
Sorry if I'm asking this in a developer forum, but I figured it's the place where I can finally get some answers after over a year of trial and error and online searching and getting nowhere.
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I recently learned that in Windows there is a way to force older apps to scale up so they are readable. I learned this when I installed Adobe Encore CS6, which is from 2012, and when launched as is in a 4K monitor that is set to 5k resolution, it looks so tiny and almost impossible to read.
So searching for a solution I came upon a setting in the compatibility tab that forces the program to scale up as if it were designed for HiDPI. Of course this is a very basic zoom into the program's GUI, so the text looks a bit blurry, but perfectly readable.
I know macOS doesn't have a setting like this, but I was wondering if it would be possible to edit any file in the package for the old app to force this, like adding something to the info.plist file, or editing something else inside the package in Xcode.
My main interest in this case is for all the older apps in the Native Instruments Komplete 9 package, a huge set of virtual instruments from 2014, many of which still have great synths and sampled instruments, but while NI updated them to work with current versions of DAWs like Logic Pro X, they haven't touched the GUI, so when I use those, I have to constantly press Control and swipe the Magic Mouse up and down to zoom in the while macOS GUI.
Please note that what I'm asking might be totally ridiculous, I'm not a developer, I figured this would be a good question for developers that know XCode or other development tools. I bet that Quartz, Metal, or whatever macOS Ventura uses for GUI scaling would do a much better job than Windows.