In our Unsung yellow pages, in between people writing Chrome plugins to fix UI of other apps, and gamers creating mods to fix bugs that the developers leave behind, we need to make some room for another category of apps.

Some time ago, Daniel Kennett created a little utility called Keyhole with a singular purpose:

Have you ever been annoyed by your Mac’s media keys triggering a random video in your web browser, doing something else weird, or by them doing… nothing? Even though your music player is right there?

Me too! And so Keyhole was born.

Keyhole intercepts media transport key presses before the operating system gets a hold of them, and promises to do a better job dispatching them to the right place.

This week Kennett added another feature – the app will monitor the repeat setting that apparently occasionally gets out of whack, and fix it for the user.

We could call these kinds of apps “janitor apps.” I know of a concept called cron jobs, but I’m assuming these quiet workers do backend-y things like moving files around, cleaning up databases, pinging servers, and so on. I am less aware of work like Kennett’s that fixes stuff on the UI layer.

Is it strange that I find this kind of an app pretty… noble? Of course, Apple should fix it; perhaps Bugs Apple Loves could even introduce a serious multiplier for “a bug bothers someone so much they fix it for Apple.”

Of note in the last dialog box: “Keyhole has fixed Music’s repeat setting X times.” I think this kind of a counter is pretty brilliant.