Ernest Rudak (Twitter)(website), a blind Mac power user, wrote a really informative piece on using AppleScript to announce glanceable information. Of course, as someone who’s not visually impaired, there are a lot of things I take for granted or never really thought about, like…
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The Sad Demise of the Harmony Remote
Last week we got notice that Logitech will no longer be making the Harmony remote. I’ve heard from so many listeners and readers over the years who made the Harmony remote an essential piece of their home-automation infrastructure. I tried using one but found…
Continue reading →The Idea of Shortcuts on the Mac
This week Jason Snell wrote an excellent article about the need for Apple to bring Shortcuts to the Mac. I’ve been thinking about that article a lot. My position on Apple bringing Shortcuts to the Mac has always been, “wait”. The reason being that…
Continue reading →ThoughtAsylum Icon Generator
Stephen Millard has made an ingenious shortcut that solves the problem of generating icons. The particular itch that Stephen was trying to scratch was the development of icons for his Stream Deck. However, if you do any automation, you’re constantly bumping into places that…
Continue reading →IFTTT Pro
For years now, many of us have had a standing “Yeah, but” for IFTTT. It’s an excellent service that reliably connects things on the Internet for simple automation. BUT, it has never embraced the complexity that you start looking for about 10 minutes after…
Continue reading →Significant Pushcut Updates
Automators take note. Pushcut has received several updates over the past few months, improving the ability to trigger automation on iOS in creative ways. The original idea behind the app was to give folks the ability to trigger iOS automation beyond those limits Apple…
Continue reading →AppleScript to Link to Apple Mail Message
I’ve always like the way OmniFocus can create links to Apple Mail messages when saving an email as a task. With help from listener Jacob (@evansio), I’ve now got a script that can do that anywhere via a text expander snippet. Here’s the AppleScript:…
Continue reading →Masters of Automation on Upgrade Podcast
Last week I attended the first ever CMD-D: Masters of Automation conference in San Jose. At the end of the day, Jason Snell did a live on-stage podcast with all the speakers, including yours truly. The show went live this week in the Upgrade…
Continue reading →The CMD-D Mac Automation Conference
When we had Sal Saghoian on the Mac Power Users a few months ago, I observed that one of the best things about him leaving Apple is that he gets to share more with us automation-loving nerds. It looks like Sal is pretty serious…
Continue reading →Automating PDF Creation from Image Files on the Mac
Recently a client sent me a contract electronically by taking a series of photos of a document. This happens to me once in a while, and usually I open the individual images in Preview, combine them, and save them as PDF. I received another…
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