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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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24 Dec 2020
I am an avid creator of Shortcuts on Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices, and also of Elgato’s Stream Deck hardware that provides me with additional dynamic trigger buttons to use on both my personal Mac and my work PC. I personally make use of a lot of text-based identifiers for content on my Stream Deck, but in other areas I revert to meaningful pictograms. I posted earlier this year about a number of repositories that would give you over 3,800 icons for use with your Stream Deck. But I’ve moved on a little from that.
I would like to explain how I am now generating icons using Apple’s Shortcuts app, that I can then use with my Stream Deck, Shortcuts (on device home pages), or in fact, any other place I would like to use a set of icons. From the variety of icon glyphs available, and the colour combinations, it works out as a possible 478,507 Billion icons, though admittedly not every colour combination would work. Still I think there must be several billion options that would, which is likely to cover many user’s day-to-day needs.
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17 Nov 2020
As you may already know, the Drafts app by AgileTortoise is a highly flexible application, and through it’s actions functionality, it effectively provides a framework through which to create customisable operations such as those you might find with plug-ins on desktop only applications.
One of the features of the actions is that you can tie them to particular keyboard shortcut combinations. But what isn’t quite so easy is the auditing of those keyboard shortcuts, and a number of people on the Drafts forums voiced their desire to have something to do this. To that end, I created a way to do this.
How? By using an action of course!
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