Matt Cassinelli joins Mac Power Users to discuss his background with Workflow and Apple and how it led to him becoming the “Shortcuts Guy.” We also discuss Apple’s automation tools across its platforms, and how those tools have extended to the web.
This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:
On this episode of Automators, Rosemary and I share some of our favorite tricks for creating, editing, and working with text.
This episode of Automators is sponsored by:
Stephen Millard is one of my favorite contributors to the Mac Automation community and his website, ThoughtAsylum, is a must-read for me. This week Stephen agreed to share his home screen.
My favourite app on the iPhone would undoubtedly have to be Drafts. I have been a long time user and it has just given me a place to get all the noise and minutiae out of my head into a trusted place that I can then deal with when I have the time to devote to it. The ability to share on was always incredibly useful and then with version 5 the flood gates opened and you could do pretty much anything with it, which I fully embraced. In fact I’ve currently got over 1.5K actions in Drafts, and most of them I created — though not all for me.
An app I really value is FaceTime. I have travelled a lot with work over the years and I have lived away from other family members for most of my life. While text messaging and telephone calls have helped, FaceTime has really enabled me to keep a closer connection with family and has allowed us to share moments easily and conveniently that could otherwise have been missed.
The app I probably use most is Overcast. When I’m doing household chores or taking walks, my AirPods are in and Overcast is giving me podcasts. I subscribe to dozens and while most are technology-related, I do switch it up with a few comedy podcasts, some productivity ones, a few HR/Learning- tech specific ones for my day job, and a few special interest ones, too. Overcast’s audio processing features hooked me day one and I’m a high-speed listener — though not for comedy, the timing simply doesn’t work. I’m still finding my way around the new UI for the latest revision, and I hope that Marco adds Shortcuts support back soon so I can use the Overcast Note in Drafts shortcut I shared when I was on MPU Ep 656.
I would say YouTube or Disney+ would be my guilty pleasure app — both probably have an equal footing. I do most of the cooking and ironing for the family, so if I get to stay put I tend to pop one of those on and pick something to fill the time.
The app that makes me most productive I would have to say is Obsidian. However, it isn’t the one I use most on the iPhone. My mobile capture to Obsidian almost always will go via Drafts. But technically I manage and document so many things through a handful of vaults that it has to win on that basis alone.
This may sound odd to those who know me, but the answer would be Shortcuts. I’ve been a big time user since the days of Workflow and back then I used to spend hours every week helping people build workflows. When Shortcuts came along I kept up the investment, but while Shortcuts has grown in capability, I know in the last few years my interest has dwindled. The main issue has been the stability and spurious errors that have broken the experience quite a number of times for end users. In addition the enthusiasm around helper apps seems to have fallen, and I’m sure the untimely passing of Alex Hay (creator of Toolbox Pro) was a big factor there as he really opened the doors in so many ways. I think this year I’ve seen solid signs of improvement in Shortcuts, and I’m hoping the new focus on intents will help have a knock-on effect with the Shortcuts ecosystem. As a result I’m optimistic about being able to resume investing more of my time and energy into Shortcuts as I’m sure there already is and definitely will be a wealth of untapped potential for me to tap into.
I don’t think there are any apps I am missing given what the platform is capable of. A few months ago I would have said a great Mastodon client app, but I eventually settled on Mona (you can read why here.)
On a typical work day, I think I probably access my phone maybe 20-30 times a day. On a non-working day I would imagine it would typically be a lot more, but it would very much depend on where I am or what I’m doing.
I have four today-view widgets:
Many moons ago, before my first child was born, I used a few Android phones. They were sluggish and needed to be rebooted a few times a day, but I could do anything I needed to with them. That is until the one I had while my wife was expecting. That one was possessed. It constantly froze, had screen issues, it was a nightmare to try and use, and I was someone who was supporting users with Android phones in my day job at the time, so I had some sense of what to expect, but this was diabolically bad. It went in for repair numerous times and every time it failed again in similar ways within a few days. My contract was up and I could finally get a new phone before my firstborn was due. I logically decided not to get another Android phone. I had an iPod Touch, and so I decided to get an iPhone instead, on the grounds that Apple gear “just worked”, and I’d had no problems with my iPod Touch (or all the iPods that came before it). I couldn’t risk not being able to get “THE” phone call to tell me my wife was going into labour. My favourite feature? Easy. The iPhone’s reliability.
I think there are two things I would like to address, and these of course are my own armchair opinions based on what little information we hear and knowing nothing of the internal workings. But, if the genie’s got my back…
The first change is around financial views. Apple has still not done anything with iCloud storage volumes for customers even though device capacities have increased. Apple is also putting too many financial barriers in place for developers. I’d like to see Apple give more back here. Provide storage that is more commensurate with the number of Apple devices a person owns, and provide better financial levels to encourage more Indie development by allowing developers to earn enough to go Indie in the first place.
The second is Shortcuts. For anyone who has followed the development of Workflow and Shortcuts, we all know about the potential in ways to improve the usability, the discoverability and the stability. As I mentioned earlier I’m hoping the new app intent focus will help give a natural boost, but I’d like them to pick up the pace on their whiteboard list of planned features. I wouldn’t’ want to take away from Apple Intelligence or anything else, but maybe you know recruit some people and triple the resources the team currently has.
I do have an Apple Watch, but the face usually has the time, battery and weather on it … nothing exciting.
I don’t like my wallpaper to be too distracting, so on my phone itself it is plain black — goes with everything. On my lock screen I have a stencilled Millennium Falcon. I had a faded version of this or a similar version on every iPhone I’ve owned. If anyone ever had to ask me “why?”, then they wouldn’t understand the answer.
In my day job I work for a company that is very safety conscious. We have a lot of colleagues who work in dangerous conditions so it’s in the company DNA. We’re always doing safety shares and I would like to recommend something to everyone, and that’s to have What3Words (W3W) on your iPhone. It is an app that overlays the planet with a grid system and assigns three words to each 3×3 square that makes up the grid. This makes it easy to share with people and is used by many emergency services.
I once had real trouble directing emergency services to a school that was less than a mile from the local hospital. The emergency operator just couldn’t find the school on her system so couldn’t dispatch the ambulance. If W3W had been around then it would have been so easy to pass those details on.
I even have a contact shortcut on my home screen (Contact Fam) that as well as allowing me to call, text, and FaceTime people I have on my “Family” list in contacts, it will also let me text them my W3W location to them, thanks to an integration with Toolbox Pro (though you can also do it directly via the API, which is what I used to do). You never know when you’ll need to pass on your location and this is a really novel and easy way to do it.
If anyone is interested in making their hardware and software do more for them, then you can check out my website, thoughtasylum.com. Here you can find hundreds of posts and a cornucopia of scripts, plugins, shortcuts, macros, extensions, etc.
Should you enjoy that and want even more content, you can keep an eye out on my monthly round up posts and get some sense of all the projects I’m working on, on Apple platforms, home automation, and any other geeky computer stuff that happens to spark my interest.
Stephen Millard • Social: Mastodon | LinkedIn • Web: thoughtasylum.com | stephenmillard.com
It’s already September, and we are a few days away from the It’s Glowtime Apple event. In today’s episode I wrap up the rumors around Monday’s event
… This is a post for MacSparky Labs Members. Care to join? Or perhaps you need to sign in?
Because I’m a little nuts, I’m running the Apple Intelligence betas on all my devices. In my opinion, Apple Intelligence still has a ways to go, and these are early days, but we’re starting to get a peek at what Apple’s been working on. The more powerful Apple Intelligence features haven’t entered beta yet, but there are already some features in this first tier of on-device Apple Intelligence features that I’m genuinely enjoying.
One of them is the message summaries. In earlier betas, they just applied to the Messages and Apple Mail apps, but now you can extend them to third-party applications. (Although you can control this in the Notification settings on a per-app basis) This means that notifications on your phone are now summarized by Apple Intelligence on-device. With less than a week of testing, I already dig it.
The summaries are more concise and include more details than the previous notifications generated by the apps. There are no teasers here. It just tells me what I need. It’s AI-based, so it occasionally gets it wrong, but we’re still in early beta, and I will give it some grace. Also, this is the worst it will ever be, and it’s already pretty good.
I often hear from listeners/readers looking for a research solution in the Mac ecosystem. My favorite app for this, without a doubt, is DEVONthink. DEVONthink is the most professional document and information management application for the Mac. It’s the one place for storing all your documents, snippets, or bookmarks, and working with them.
The integrated AI engine assists you with filing and searching, while the extensive search language includes advanced Boolean operators.
DEVONthink features a flexible sync system that supports many cloud services — or lets you synchronize over your local network — with everything securely encrypted. This gives you the choice for whichever syncing works best for you!
It has Smart rules and flexible reminders that let you automate all parts of your workflow and delegate boring, repeating tasks. Let DEVONthink automatically organize your data with rules you define!
DEVONthink’s AppleScript dictionary is one of the best on the Mac. There’s no part of DEVONthink that can’t be automated. Extend DEVONthink’s functionality with your own commands by adding them to its Scripts menu.
Even templates can have scripts inside, and you can set up new documents with data from placeholders or insert them using your own AppleScript code.
DEVONthink just continues to get better. In the latest update they improved PDF annotation, Evernote import, Markdown functionality, and added even more AppleScript and JavaScript automation.
I find DEVONthink’s combination of innovative features and automation support irresistible. Interested? MacSparky readers can get a 20% discount on DEVONthink.
If the rumors are to be believed, with the upcoming iPhone 16 announcement Apple will introduce a new capture button that will be added to the phones across the line (both pro and non-pro models). The tea leaves also say that this new capture button will be mechanical, not capacitive, but that it may be touch-sensitive. This is so it can detect, for instance, swiping across the button as opposed to pressing it.
After a year with the Action button on the iPhone 15 Pro, I can tell you I am sold on these additional buttons. I’ve programmed my Action button to be context-sensitive to my current Focus mode. If I’m in Work Focus mode, pressing the button does different things than when I’m in Personal Focus mode or Disneyland Focus mode. (Yes. I have a Disneyland Focus.) In most modes, the Action button gives me a menu of options. In Disneyland mode, it just takes a picture. So, adding an additional button makes it that much better in my mind.
However, what we haven’t heard from the rumors is whether this physical button will be programmable. While I have no problem with Apple making the default behavior of the capture button to take a picture, I admit I would be disappointed if it wasn’t programmable. Not everybody wants to take a picture. Maybe for some people, “capture” means adding an item to their task list or recording a voice memo, or, in my case, triggering a customized shortcut that does all sorts of cool tricks. While I suspect a large percentage of people will use a capture button just to take photos (and by “large percentage” I mean over 90%), I hope Apple makes that button programmable for the rest of us.
There’s a new version of one of my favorite window managers. However, with the upcoming built-in Window Management features coming with macOS Sequoia, do we even need a third-party window manager?
… This is a post for MacSparky Labs Members. Care to join? Or perhaps you need to sign in?
I often hear from listeners and readers looking for a research solution in the Mac ecosystem. My favorite app for this, without a doubt, is DEVONthink. DEVONthink is the most professional document and information management application for the Mac. It’s the one place for storing all your documents, snippets, or bookmarks, and working with them.
The integrated AI engine assists you with filing and searching, while the extensive search language includes advanced Boolean operators.
DEVONthink features a flexible sync system that supports many cloud services — or lets you synchronize over your local network — with everything securely encrypted. This gives you the choice for whichever syncing works best for you!
It has Smart rules and flexible reminders that let you automate all parts of your workflow and delegate boring, repeating tasks. Let DEVONthink automatically organize your data with rules you define!
DEVONthink’s AppleScript dictionary is one of the best on the Mac. There’s no part of DEVONthink that can’t be automated. Extend DEVONthink’s functionality with your own commands by adding them to its Scripts menu. Even templates can have scripts inside and you can set up new documents with data from placeholders, or inserted using your own AppleScript code.
DEVONthink just continues to get better. In the latest update they improved PDF annotation, Evernote import, Markdown functionality, and added even more AppleScript and JavaScript automation.
I find DEVONthink’s combination of innovative features and automation support irresistible. Interested? MacSparky readers can get a 20% discount on DEVONthink.
Every September, it is my privilege to play a small part in the enormous enterprise of the Relay St. Jude Fundraiser. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, located in Memphis, Tennessee, is one of the premier research hospitals in the world, treating and researching childhood cancer and other diseases.
If your child has cancer, St. Jude will be there for you, and you will never receive a bill — no strings attached.
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is one of the largest research hospitals in the world. When St. Jude opened fifty years ago, the childhood cancer survival rate was 20%. Now, partly due to St. Jude’s efforts, it’s 80%. As successful as they’ve been, they’re not satisfied. They want to wipe out childhood cancer, and they are relentless in their efforts.
Unlike most hospitals, the majority of their funding comes from donors. My friend Stephen has a personal experiencewith St. Jude that you can read about. But regardless, this is a worthwhile cause.
Many of us are about to send a lot of money Apple’s way as they announce their fall lineup of products. When doing that, perhaps think about sending some money to St. Jude as well. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting several people from St. Jude over the years, and they are singularly devoted to their cause. Also, look into employee matching at your company. The Walt Disney Company is very generous; each year, we double our contribution through my wife’s employment matching.