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Powerful Mac Launcher App
Video Tutorials
Modern Apple Automation
Prebuilt Shortcuts
Capture and Process Text
Extension for Drafts
Markdown Knowledgebases
Text Replacement
Customisable File Manager
26 Aug 2023
Whether I’m at home, or travelling, I often find I want to access my home-based Mac Mini from my Macbook Pro. I have several options at my disposal for doing this, and when I want to access the graphical user interface, then I want to be able to use all my usual tools. One of these is the launcher utility, Alfred.
By default, if I were to have Alfred configured the same across my devices, then it would be very difficult to know which device Alfred should trigger on, and it would default to my local device. For a good while, I used different triggers on different devices but I found it a little frustrating to have to switch up what was effectively muscle memory depending upon the device I was using.
In the end, I came up with a little automation to help me with this.
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23 Jul 2023
Writing blog posts is something that I generally struggle to make time to do. I have always got several parallel activities on the go and writing everything down takes time and slow down progress. Things also come up and disrupt the flow, providing further challenges. I feel writing blog posts is useful as it allows me to share thoughts and solutions that others can then build on and utilise for their own needs, but I don’t have a way to set a structured regular time to do this, so it is an ad hoc activity. This frequently results in me starting writing up a post to be published on one day, but it getting delayed. Because my blog posts and assets utilise the publish date, this can lead to a bit of remedial work to line things up again prior to publishing.
After doing this manually a few times, I created an automation to allow me to quickly shift posts and assets to a new publish date. In this post I am going to outline how I do this to give you some ideas of how you might accomplish something similar with your own similar scenarios.
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25 Jun 2023
Drafts, by AgileTortoise, is my ubiquitous note app. I use it for capturing ideas, drafting content, shopping lists, general note taking, and more besides. The content is often temporary, but when it isn’t, the content gets reflowed off into files (such as in one of my Obsidian vaults), social media posts, e-mails, or some other channel. Last year I also began using another note app - Tot by the IconFactory.
Tot has a very different view of notes. It is a much simpler app and is opinionated in how complex it can get. But, what it gave me on the Mac was a free menu bar app that I could keep snippets on for short periods.
In real world terms, I think of Drafts as my ubiquitous pocket notebook, and Tot as the pad of last few sticky notes on my desk. There is undoubtedly overlap, and I am sure I could make Drafts provide near identical functionality to Tot. However, having a distinction between them works for me, and having Tot as a separate app to fulfil a niche requirement in my workflows has stuck.
The only friction that occurred is where I wanted to transfer information between the two apps. But I’ve been able to smooth that over and I’m going to explain how in the remainder of this post.
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