We are a handful of days into May, so it is time to push out my monthly update for what I’ve been up to. Not at the levels I managed in January, but a lift on February as I managed to get a few posts and other updates pushed out this last month. I’ve also made some great progress behind the scenes on something else, but I’ll talk briefly about that below.
ThoughtAsylum
Over on my website I managed a couple of posts about things I have been working on.
The first was something that simply dropped and I was alerted to based on a feature request I made last year to the team over at Running with Crayons. Alfred has been updated to include a new file that keeps a history of the workflows that have been navigated to. This means that the most recent addition is the name of the current workflow, and from that we can derive some other information. From that I was able to build a new Hookmark integration for Alfred that means I can finally hook my workflows to my workflow documentation in Obsidian. To get the integration script and all the juicy details, check out the Automation Documentation: Hooking Alfred Workflows post.
The second post is something I have been using for a few months and took me a while to get written up as there were quite a few aspects to it I wanted to cover. In fact I still have more to save about it that is a bit more advanced, but I’ll hopefully have that in a follow-up post. The post is about the Xencelabs Quick Keys Remote and how to use it for Mac Automation. The remote is a hardware device similar in function to a macro pad or Elgato Stream Deck, but wonderfully portable, which is why it caught my attention. Unfortunately, the software that comes with it does not lend itself at all well to automation. As a result, when i first got my hands on one, it took me a few hours of experimentation to come up with some ways of working that were flexible enough for my needs. The post goes step by step through all the details and includes lots of useful information including a full list of all the trigger options for the remote and how to create a file to open to a URL.
Further to that, tucked away is the first app I have created for the Mac. I used a tool to help build it, and it is very simple, but I did spring for a developer’s license, and I am hoping to dip my toe into Apple development later this year. I worked as a developer for a number of years and have coded and scripted my way through over two dozen languages, so hopefully I can at least get to the point where I can use it to solve some of my own needs. What was the app? Well it is something for running command line scripts … in the background.
Forums
The forums this month for me were definitely a mixed bag but there are a couple that I would particularly highlight - both on the Automator’s forum. The first is a post about the passing of Alex Hay, and the second is about some beta testing I did for Bike Outliner by Jesse Grosjean. Both worth a read through for very different reasons.
Drafts
I made some suggestions for making the development of actions easier by running through a set of action-based tools I created to do just that. There is probably something in there for everyone, and I certainly use them in my own action development.
A bit of topic resurrection on this one where I pointed out to a user how to create a workspace that shows only tagged notes.
I am not an iA Writer user myself, but I was able to give a Drafts user the necessary guidance for how to create a step to send to iA Writer after creating a draft.
While Greg has recently released a new version of Drafts with scripting support for ChatGPT, Xiao Meng’s original ChatGPT Conversation Action has proven very popular. I made a suggestion on API feedback that was taken onboard after a bit of discussion. While the cost of using ChatGPT is minimal, I still feel the feedback, particularly on large volumes of text, is valuable. I’m not on the ChatGPT bandwagon currently as I haven’t found a direct use for it for me. I use it indirectly to summarise articles to see if they are worth reading in detail via a reader service I use, but that’s it for me for now.
There was a new app integration request, for yet another new app with little documentation and no obvious integration features. Reflect.app integration with Drafts may be possible, but the information just isn’t there, the original poster did not come back with any additional information about where the notes are stored(files?), and I wasn’t about to go installing yet another paid for app. It looks rather Notion like to me and not remotely Obsidian-like as the poster suggested.
A request for help with a TaskPaper to OmniFocus Project action no longer working prompted the usual request for actionable information, but in the end turned out to be the installation of multiple versions of the same action. Obviously not a good approach to managing your actions.
It seems like Trello have had an issue with their app that is affecting users who are populating it from Drafts.
There was some Alfred Workflow for Drafts discussions that seem to relate to my Doctor Drafts workflow, but were posted on an earlier workflow’s topic thread.
A bit of helpful direction was given on how to create a shortcut to search for Drafts without a tag and automatically assign a tag to them.
I provided some pointers for having Java code in Drafts.
There was an interesting question about how to sort text by line length. That had never occurred to me as something someone would want to sort text by, but I managed to whip up a script-based action that uses 10 lines of code to deliver the requested functionality.
I came up with a Drafts action to merge content of selected drafts to the clipboard in response to a merge query.
Some guidance was given on building an automation to archive old drafts automatically.
A current date and time error was shown to be user error.
Once again creating tagged drafts in a workspace automatically came up. There is a definite lack of understanding on what a workspace is (filter not bucket), and as a result how really powerful they can be. I keep thinking I should try my hand at a write up to walk people through from basics to advanced use, and cover exactly what can and cannot be done with standard features and custom actions to support draft creation.
There was a brief discussion on adding actions to the Mac from the Drafts directory - it is very easy to do.
Automators
First of all, the Mac automation community lost a leading developer of Shortcuts automation tools. If you are here, please take a moment to take a look at the In Memory of Alex Hay the creator of Toolbox Pro topic on the forum.
I posted a solution on how to use HomeBot in Shortcuts to trigger particular home scenes.
An unusual question on browser automation on Java solutions and Windows applications required a bit of detail on automated test platforms that somehow the original poster managed to assess and query back about without selecting a single link. I do wonder sometimes if people ask questions for free consultancy and everything handed to them rather than to get advice they can take the initiative on.
I had the opportunity to recommend a little utility I shared on Mac Power Users episode 656 as an alternative to adding all menu commands from an application into Keyboard Maestro.
I do find automated printing on the Mac surprisingly tricky to do given how easy I would expect it to be. But I think my fallback of using CUPS is the simplest approach when it comes to doing any printing automation.
I outlined a suggestion for the use of the “at” to set a variable launch time. for an Automator workflow.
One user is in a position I don’t envy, looking for recommendations re workflow/approach for a large book editing task in Microsoft Word. I’ve built half a fulfilment system automated through Microsoft Word before, and I’ve had to build and fix some pretty large and complex documents, but I would never have attempted this. Fundamentally this has an issue in terms of the tool that was chosen. There are other tools and workflows that could have handled this seamlessly and produced the requisite Word document in the end. Whoever the publisher is needs to seriously look at the details they provide for their workflow.
There was a request to open an album in shortcuts. Unfortunately and a lack of provision on how far they had got, a certain amount of ambiguity, and limitations on what Shortcuts can do meant an answer that I think provided some clarity.
In the episode 126 topic on Safari automation, I offered up a potential way that Rosemary Orchard might have approached something she commented on but didn’t explain in detail in the episode. I also queried what another poster noted as they seem to have a way of doing something no one else seems to.
A question on how to open an HTTP (not HTTPS) link in Chrome on iPad had a fairly obvious answer, but I still can’t figure out why they were doing things the way they were.
Finally, I spent a good chunk of time helping Jesse Grosjean of Hogbay Software (the guy who created Taskpaper) with some testing of Bike Outliner’s Shortcuts support. Hopefully, my testing has helped address a few bugs, but I am a bit surprised that no one else got involved in the discussions and building test shortcuts.
Other
Off the back of my earlier work with Hookmark, Matt Ehler pulled me into a conversation on Mastodon, where he was asking if it was possible to use File Actions in Alfred with Hookmark. This is not something supported by the official Hookmark workflow for Alfred, and he wondered if I knew how to do it such that it would be possible to get a file’s Hookmark link. Well, I did know how to do that and a bit more.
I created a new Alfred workflow called Hookmark Extra that provides some file actions to complement the official workflow. Not only can you get the link (URL) or a Markdown link for a file, you can also get the list of bookmarks associated with the file, which you can then open, copy, or copy a Markdown link for. It also has external triggers making it a generally good Alfred citizen.
I also wrote up and published access to an Alfred workflow I created while working on Ste-Mux. The Read the 🤐 Manual workflow. While Dash is a great documentation search and presentation tool, and I do use the Alfred integration, I often find manual pages more accessible for command line scripting. Because of that I created Read the 🤐 Manual to give me quick and easy access to manual pages.
On a side note, it is rather disappointing that the FAQ states that “the sooner you submit your workflows, the earlier you’ll be added to the Gallery” and that most of the workflows in the gallery appear to have been submitted after mine. Six months in the submission process feels particularly slow to me, especially given how many later submissions I see that have been processed. The key benefit of the gallery is that it would make the workflows more discoverable to users, but the flip side is the fact that they have always been available via my web site and I have no plans to change that. Self publishing means I can immediately publish new workflows. Hopefully, I have enough of a positive reputation that people will trust the workflows I have written as much as any of the workflows reviewed by the Alfred team, so there shouldn’t be any detrimental impact there.
The upshot at this point is that I am not posting any new Alfred workflows to the Alfred forum for gallery submission. It takes time to put together the submissions properly to the required specifications. It isn’t interesting work, and it is time that I could spend doing other more interesting things. Should the backlog on my workflows be cleared, then I will probably make the time to put together the submissions, but right now, I would just be adding to the backlog, so it would if anything just be compounding the submission issue.
Upcoming
I have eluded a few times to a new project I have been working on, and without going into details, it has been going well. Particularly so in April. All the ground work and automations to speed things up (significantly!) have now been built, tested, and documented. The next phase is the slog of researching and writing, and this is well underway. I suspect with the best will in the world and all of the automation I’ve created to help me, I am still a good way off from it being ready to share. But, when I do, I am hoping it will be useful to an entire community of users. But, time will tell, and as a minimum, I will personally get some good use from it.
This coming month I am also travelling down to London for a some work related events. So, if you happen to be in active in the learning technology space in the UK, you might well be aware of some of these events, and you may even see me around if you keep your eyes peeled.
As ever, thank you so much to everyone who has bought me a coffee. Caffeine continues to fuel my most productive sessions and I hope I can continue to provide benefit to others through my efforts.