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21 May 2021
For anyone using a Mac for an extended period of time and looking for ways to do things better, the chances are that you will have come across the name Brett Terpstra. Brett is a creative guy who shares a lot of the things he makes that help make life on the Mac that bit easier. Something I am totally on board with, taking a similar approach myself across the platforms I deal with. A few days ago Brett updated one of his tools, and one that I use regularly. A tool called Search Link. I figured this might be a good time to publish a small Alfred workflow I have for working with Search Link.
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22 Apr 2021
Building on my recent spate of Alfred workflow posts, it’s time to share my most complex workflow to date, and it is for one of my favourite applications, Drafts. As you might know I do quite a lot with Drafts, and I’m really excited to share what I’ve come up with as a 1.0 workflow. It might be a bit more than you expect, and it is certainly far more than I had expected!
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23 Mar 2021
If you speak to anyone who more than dabbles in automation on macOS, Keyboard Maestro is almost certainly going to be a utility that gets mentioned. I’m certainly no stranger to the application and have been using it for over a decade to manage a large proportion of my Mac automations. But when you invest like that, you do tend to build up a large set of macros and having memorable ways to access them with short codes, hot keys, gestures, palettes, etc. can become a little overwhelming. I’m personally much better at remembering parts of the names and so searching an index of the available macros helps me with the ones I don’t have in regular circulation, and that’s what today’s Alfred workflow enables.
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22 Mar 2021
Recently I’ve been working on smartening up some of my personal workflows for Alfred, the launcher application for macOS. I’ve been a long time user of Alfred and while I created a popular workflow for working with Evernote back in it’s early days, I’ve not posted something about Alfred for the best part of a decade. This seems ridiculous to me given how often I use it and how embedded it is in so much of the way I work on my Mac.
The time is long overdue to put change that and I have several workflows to share in the not too distant future. Today, I’ll be starting off with one of my simpler workflows, but one that I use regularly. It is one to control the Mac app known as Amphetamine.
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28 Feb 2021
After my appearance on the Automators podcast, there was a pleasant boost in interest in the ThoughtAsylum Action Group Suite for Drafts. One of the things that came out of this was people wanting to have a way for the underlying ThoughtAsylum Drafts Library (TADpoLe) to be automatically updated. In this post I’m going to talk about the solution I’ve come up with and the approach taken.
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20 Feb 2021
Towards the end of 2020 I was caught by surprise and asked to appear as a guest on one of my favourite podcasts; Automators from Relay.fm. As the name implies, this is a podcast about automation, and is very much based around end-user personal automation rather than larger business and enterprise automations. Having never been on a podcast before, I took the plunge and accepted.
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20 Jan 2021
This is a brief post that addresses an obstacle I find myself coming across quite frequently when I’m working with images on my Mac. While I use several image manipulation apps for various purposes and levels of work, Pixelmator Pro is my daily driver. One thing I find overly complex however is getting a clipboard image into the app as a new image. There’s just a couple two many manual navigation bits that in many other apps is a simple key press. But there’s a simple solution.
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18 Jan 2021
I’ve been a long time user of Markdown and have found it a convenient format in which to capture notes and documentation day to day. Utilising Markdown opens up a wealth of options for me in terms of capturing and processing content. I’ve been using Obsidian for a while as a repository for notes and I’ve been expanding my use into some new vaults recently, but as a cross-platform user I’ve been limited in my ability to easily capture thoughts when away from my desk. Until now. Now I have a solution that allows me to easily capture using Drafts.
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17 Jan 2021
Late last year, I got involved in a discussion on the Drafts forum about resolving an issue with a Bear action that was a little outdated, and more recently in an ongoing thread about importing content from Bear into Drafts. Through looking at these, my interest was piqued and I decided to have a look at adding some Bear integration into the ThoughtAsylum Library for Drafts , TADpoLe.
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26 Dec 2020
As a passionate user of the Drafts app by AgileTortoise, I usually spend at least some time each day on the Drafts forums catching up on the latest news and discussions, and helping other users with their queries where I can. Sometimes that help requires a few iterations of questions, tests and reviews. At times people can struggle as to what it is they are looking for. Recently I gave some consideration as to what I could do to speed up the process and help people provide pertinent information faster.
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