It has been a rather cold and wet time in the UK this past month. While that doesn’t really narrow it down, the 29-day stint squarely marks this as a leap February. The day job took up more time than usual towards the start of the month, but I clawed things back towards the end, which was a good job as I had some extra volunteering commitments to plan and fit in alongside everything else. With a bit of time here and there I’ve been busy beavering away on a new mini-project that came to fruition that I’ll cover below.
ThoughtAsylum
There has been just the one post this past month, sneaking in on that leap day. It is actually a post that came about because of my mini-project. It relates to my launcher app of choice, Alfred, and a frustration I had encountered a few times. Alfred’s workflows allow branching and logic, but I had never discovered any option to allow use and return (functions and subroutines) for workflows. You can get reuse of scripts by loading them from file rather than embedding them in action blocks, and while I do this a lot, sometimes you want to tap into the workflow-side of things a little more.
In my Pseudo Functions in Alfred Workflows post I set out an example of how I have accomplished this in a round about way by defining return points and passing the name of the return point to a flow. It works well, and while you may be able to get away with scripts in the main, this will hopefully help workflow developers cover things off for the cases were utilising a separate Alfred workflow flow would provide a better option.
Forums
As usual, I’ve been trying to help people out on a couple of online forums I frequent regularly and as usual, there are some interesting queries, interactions and solutions.
Drafts
At least one user noted some OpenAI-ChatGPT actions were not working. I identified the cause, and subsequently some functionality was deprecated in Drafts 43.0.
There was a discussion about how to end an action, yet still run the After Success configuration. There was a bit of collaborative contribution to this one, and the overall result certainly taught me something new about how Drafts processes template tags.
I pitched in with a worked example on a query about creating an action that can be “called” by other actions, and fell foul once again of a convenience feature in Drafts. This then went on to inform an update to the Add Lines to List action.
I tried to explain a limitation in relation to sharing to Drafts from YoTube that can’t be ‘fixed’ by a change to Drafts.
I tried to explain a Todoist limitation on a new feature where a user was having an issued adding a duration in Todoist.
Gregg has released a new scanning app, but tor try and help with the workflow some people were taking with the new app, I tried to explain how the approach was quite different and if they were wanting to scan into Drafts, they would be better off using Drafts' own scanning functionality.
I’m not particularly familiar with Tana, but I tried to add some suggestions to a query about exporting from Drafts to Tana.
I suggested a reason a user might be seeing Drafts starting in the middle of the page.
I included a couple of suggestions for a question on sending a Draft to iOS Reminders with a prompt to choose which list.
Lastly there was a peculiar response to one of my replies on a ‘hyperlinks on as default’ post. I can’t figure out the intention. Can you?
Automators
I suggested a couple of app options to allow the enabling of Bluetooth when connecting to a specific wifi network.
Someone had a query about what could be causing issues with running consecutive shortcuts and I made what I felt were obvious points based on the limited content of their post.
Someone resurrected an old Shortcuts thread on how to add a new line in a regex expression with Text Replace with some details that when I pressed seem to me to be unfounded and spurious, and the overall suggestion of a workaround to me was simply a restatement of my original solution. I simply disengaged in the discussion when in their last response to me they showed they had not actually looked properly at how my (very short) shortcut was actually working.
I replied to a question about interest in Project Tapestry.
I added some additional information to support and further secure earlier suggestions on how to run a script over SSH on a remote device in Shortcuts.
The saga of the WhatsApp message via automation error continued, and sounds like the user probably just had bad contacts data so What’s App was struggling to find the right contact data. But it is still a mystery as even the explanation starts talking about “locations”?!
I provided a solution of how to convert rows of Excel into individual Markdown files on macOS.
I’m not a Notion user, but I am a documentation reader, so somewhat surprisingly I was able to help with a request to export a Notion page as Markdown.
I’m definitely more of a Python tinkerer than a Python programmer at the moment, but I managed to help a forum member with using a Python script as a folder action.
Finally I asked for help testing a new Alfred workflow, but you can find out more about that below.
Other
The available time I have had this past month has been consumed by the development and testing of a new Alfred workflow and creating a new site documenting its features. You can view this site at cluster.thoughtasylum.com and download the workflow right from the home page.
What does it do? Well, if you read last month’s summary, you may recall I was adopting the use of Bunch, a utility app that allows you to launch sets of applications, run commands, etc. to enable you to efficiently switch work contexts, setting your Mac up how you want it. The new workflow, Cluster, allows the user to interact with Bunch from Alfred.
The workflow helps you not only open and close bunches, but also includes functionality to help with editing bunches, creating/cloning new bunches, controlling the bunch app itself, and even adds bunch archiving as a feature. The workflow is highly configurable, and of course, like other workflows I’ve created, is designed such that you can easily integrate functionality into your own Alfred workflows via a large number of external triggers embedded within the workflow.
If you happen to be an Alfred user and are interested in using it with Bunch, do check it out. While it is scratching my own itch, I suspect this will be something that fits well for many others too. I also expect to be expanding it over time.
Upcoming
Now I’ve scratched my Bunch-related itch with Cluster it is time to get back to my bigger ongoing project from last year; well technically it probably started in 2022, but regardless I’m going to get it out to folks this year and I’m definitely looking at Q2. Anything else will be a bonus, but I’ve had enough of a diversion now to come back to this one refreshed and with a clear intention to get it ready for all - including me.
All that remains is for me to once again thank everyone who has donated a coffee. I truly appreciate it ☕