Posts in tutorials

Automating Mail Signatures and Senders with AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro

Mail Keyboard Maestro

Mail Keyboard Maestro

I’m aware of the fact that it’s a common trend to call email a “nightmare” these days, but the truth is – email works for me. I have multiple addresses set up, I have my filters and smart folders to automate the process of filing and finding emails, and I’m enjoying the renewed interest of iOS developers in building email apps that solve old problems in new ways. But there is one thing I don’t like: Apple’s Mail app and how many clicks it takes to switch between configured accounts and signatures. As you can guess, I came up with a way to automate the process using AppleScript and (optionally) Keyboard Maestro.

I receive several messages every day to different email addresses, but I always want to reply with the same address and the same signature. Apple’s Mail app makes it easy to see all messages sent to all accounts with the unified Inbox, but it makes it surprisingly hard to set default accounts and signatures that should always be treated as, well, default ones. I don’t want to click on menus for accounts and signatures: I want to hit ⌘R and receive a new Reply window with the account and signature I want already set. Read more

Search For Rdio Lyrics with Keyboard Maestro

Macro

Macro

In spite of the existence of various Mac apps to display lyrics of a song that’s currently playing in iTunes or Rdio, I often find myself having to manually look them up through a web browser. It’s not uncommon to see a dedicated lyrics app being unable to fetch lyrics for a certain song, and, unsurprisingly, that always seems to happen when I’m in the mood for learning new lyrics. Having to Google lyrics and type a song’s name is a tedious process that ought to be automated, so that’s what I did. Read more

Quickly Append Browser URLs To Evernote with Keyboard Maestro

I often come across webpages and interesting links that I can’t check out right away, but that I also don’t want to send to Instapaper, Pinboard, or my OmniFocus inbox. They are, put simply, “stuff to check out”; I append these URLs to an Evernote note carrying the same name:

Macro

Macro

As I detailed in my review of Drafts 3.0 for iOS, appending text from an iPhone or iPad is easy with Agile Tortoise’s app and a combination of Evernote actions and browser bookmarklets, but I had to think of an equally straightforward workflow for the Mac. Unfortunately, the lack of a Drafts app for OS X forced me to resort to AppleScript to achieve the same kind of functionality, but the deal was (partially) sweetened by the new features introduced in Keyboard Maestro 6.0, released back in May.

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Rdio 2.2 Includes URL Scheme for Search

Rdio 2.2, released earlier today, includes – besides an improved interface and label search – a new URL scheme for launching searches from other apps (thanks, Adam). The URL scheme is fairly simple:

rdio://search/[search term]

In the past, I relied on a hack made possible by Bang On to redirect Rdio web URLs to the Rdio app. The problem with that solution was that it was a finicky process that couldn’t launch full, native searches directly in the Rdio app. The new version enables just that: you can now use the URL scheme to create search actions that will display pre-populated results in Rdio for iOS.

The new URL scheme means it’s easy to set up actions that trigger Rdio searches in apps like Launch Center Pro or Drafts. For this kind of quick search, my pick is Launch Center Pro, which I already use to launch Chrome and Pinbrowser searches. Until the Launch Center Pro team adds support for Rdio search in the Action Composer (they’re aware of it), you can create a custom action with the following URL:

rdio://search/[prompt]

Then, every time you want to search for something on Rdio, instead of opening the Rdio app and manually heading to the search field you can just open Launch Center Pro, type your search terms in a keyboard prompt, and tap a button to be redirected to a search inside the Rdio app.

I’ve been looking forward to a Rdio URL scheme for search for a long time. If you don’t want to use Launch Center Pro, you can build a custom action for Drafts, Mr. Reader, or any app that supports launching other apps via URL scheme.

Share To Flipboard Magazines From Drafts

Flipboard

Flipboard

I’m a big fan of Flipboard’s magazine feature, which was introduced earlier this year with version 2.0 of the app. By leveraging Flipboard’s existing presentation style – capable of re-formatting web articles, videos, and photos with a beautiful print-like layout – magazines allow anyone to put together a collection of interesting links that others can subscribe to, read, and share. I am subscribed to dozens of Flipboard magazines and I send links to my Games one on a daily basis.

Most of my automation tips stem from minor annoyances with default solutions, so yesterday I decided to create a simple, yet effective Drafts URL action to easily open Flipboard’s share interface without having to read a webpage in the browser. Read more

Fix iTunes Links Not Launching iTunes in Google Chrome

Chrome

Chrome

I recently got annoyed by the fact that Google Chrome couldn’t open iTunes links in the iTunes app on my Mac, so I decided to look for a solution.

I haven’t been following Chrome’s (numerous) updates in quite a while, so I don’t remember when the app got a redesigned Settings page. In spite of the cleaner look, though, there’s still an option to manage “protocol handlers”, which are the settings that determine how Chrome should work with webpages that request to open other applications installed on a computer, such as Apple’s iTunes Preview website and iTunes. Read more

How I Resize and Rename Images with Automator, Name Mangler, and TextExpander

Name Mangler

Name Mangler

A few weeks ago, while I was preparing my coverage of Apple’s Q2 2013 earnings call, I grew tired of my system to resize and rename images on OS X, so I rebuilt it from scratch using Automator, Name Mangler 3, and TextExpander.

When I create images for MacStories, I either keep them at a single size between 600 and 650 pixels, or use two separate versions: the original larger size, and a smaller one that links to the full version. In either case, images are uploaded to our CDN with Cyberduck, which I have been using for years and that has never failed me. Until last month, the process of duplicating the larger image and saving it to a smaller size was entirely manual – something that, I later realized, was surprising considering I try to automate as many aspects of my daily workflow as possible. I decided to fix this before the Apple earnings call because I knew Excel was going to export our charts as large PNGs – but, mostly, because it really didn’t make sense to keep on manually clicking menus and selecting sizes after all these years of writing for MacStories. Read more

Linked Posts with Drafts and Poster

When we announced a new format for linked posts last week, I hadn’t set up a proper workflow to create linked posts on the iPhone and iPad. Driven by annoyance, I put together a Drafts action and a bookmarklet to help me post links to WordPress with or without additional text and quotes.

Our linked posts use a custom field to link back to the original source and format the clickable titles that you see on the site. Tom Witkin’s Poster is my default app to publish posts on MacStories from iOS, and, fortunately, it has support for calling and assigning values to custom fields from the URL scheme. On the other hand, Agile Tortoise’s Drafts, my favorite app to chain multiple actions together, can launch custom URL actions differentiating between the first line of a note and everything else after it. That seemed like a good opportunity to separate my source URL from any possible text I wanted to add to a linked post. Read more