We are now well and truly over the mid-way point of the year (1 July this year for those who are keeping track), and as usual it seems to be a bit of a blur. This past month particularly so for me. I have spent a lot of time focusing on work, and other non-work things to try and keep a balance on my mental health as I supported a family member who unfortunately passed away this month. My way of coping helps me not to dwell, but I still reflect every day on recent events. While I haven’t exactly accomplished everything I had planned for this month I do still have plenty to share with you all.
ThoughtAsylum
This month I just made one blog post, and it was a bit of an unusual one for me. I had a trip down to London towards the end of the month to attend the Relay 10th anniversary show. Relay is a podcast network whose co founders are based in the US and the UK, and they have a couple of podcasts on the network I have had the pleasure of being invited on to as a guest. My post covers the show, a meet up the night before, and an obligatory Apple Store visit - London has some rather swanky Apple Stores compared to what I’m used to in the north of the UK; though the Birmingham store in the Midlands is an exceptional building too.
You can get my view from my Relay 10 blog post.
Forums
I guess there are a lot of people on a summer break in the northern hemisphere right now, so the volume of forum queries is a little down compared to usual.
Drafts
Case sensitive tagging is always a topic of debate in systems, and there was a discussion around deleting an unused tag that tipped into this, and required one of Drafts' inbuilt maintenance tools to resolve.
A user needed some help sending content in Drafts to OneNote with the right title
A request for help with MGCheckListPrompt got a little discussion on the Drafts forum, but it was also effectively cross-posted to the Automators forum, where I added my answer.
A Drafts user was having trouble with Drafts reopening after completing an action, my guess was on point. Can you figure out the cause without knowing what action is being used?
A user posted an issue about Drafts losing formatting when pasting text that includes tabs. There was a good amount of flawed logic in this one. The issue is real, but the cause and the tests to prove it, well, not so much.
I managed to share the necessary insight on including tags in an X-Callback-URL for Drafts. The docs say you should have multiple tag query parameters, but that isn’t strictly true in practice.
One user has no Drafts share extension not showing in Sonoma, and it isn’t even appearing in settings. I made some suggestions, but none of them helped. Do you have any other ideas you could share to help the user resolve this?
Can you add actions to the Drafts toolbar? No, but there is of course an alternative for just this purpose.
Automators
A question about converting a PDF to a dark mode version on macOS was posted, and it reads very much to me like they are mixing up a lot of technologies, and don’t really seem to grasp this in the replies.
Episode 159 on Stream Decks had a couple of questions I was able to wade I on.
There was a Shortcuts query on how to specify a print quantity in a shortcut. My answer was to go old school and in effect, queue up the print job multiple times.
I posted about the Relay FM 10th Anniversary event in case there were any other “automators” around. If there were, I don’t think they regularly use the forum.
Someone posted a reference to their blog post on their grocery shopping setup using Shortcuts, OmniFocus, Omni Automation, and Reminders, and asked for feedback. After a few weeks, no one else has provided any yet, but I set out some suggestions.
The automation to check the value of a car query from June continued into July. The issue this time appears to be an assumption from the original poster that I had previously written one thing, whereas I had written something quite different.
There were a couple of questions around widget memory limits/usage I contributed some answers to.
How can you have the same shortcut in multiple widgets? We may lack Smart Folders for this, but there is another way that doesn’t mean duplicating and maintaining widgets that I shared with the poster. I also added some additional context from the Workflow days and current day to explain some of the constraints.
An old post from last November slipped back in this month. It had previously had no replies, and was around automatically converting Pages documents to Word and PDF documents. This month it got a few, including one from me.
As noted above for the Drafts forum, I answered a query to better allow someone to choose from a list. It was poorly worded in that Draft was mentioned in the body, but Shortcuts in the title, and no mention this time of the MGCheckListPrompt, but I gave a solid and simple Drafts solution to the underlying request. Being able to correctly define your requirements is something a lot of people would do well to develop.
There was an interesting discussion around photo wrangling, and once again, trying to tease out what the real requirements actually are. Would you know how to differentiate the two stated requirements of “photo wrangling” and “(photo) organising”?
Adding a generating a project abbreviation from a string in Shortcuts? is relatively straight forward with a good definition, and a little regular expression that supports it. However, even when requirements seem clear, they haven’t always necessarily considered the full scope of cases. Wherever possible it is worth digging in, and dealing with them too - which is exactly what I did in this topic.
And finally, it wouldn’t be beta season if someone didn’t ask if they should install a beta operating system - “Should I risk the Beta for easier editing of long shortcuts?”. The answer is always “No”. People considering running betas should not have to ask. They should already know the risks, and the responsibilities. If you have to ask, the answer is always “No”, and if you don’t have to ask, you know even then, the answer is usually “No”.
Other
DAP User Group
As well as heading down to London for the Relay event, I was also there the week before to present at a user group in Tower Bridge House. In my day job I work with technology that supports learning, and as part of that I lead internally from a technical perspective on our use of a Digital Adoption Platform. This is a way to support end users in the flow of their work when working with computer systems.
Picture: “London Bridge House” - Steve Cadman, Flickr … though it is actually Tower Bridge House, not London Bridge House.
My presentation ended up being a little shoe-horned in at the end due to scheduling issues on the day, and no one wants to be delivering a presentation at the time everyone is supposed to be heading out for their train or a drink in the bar round the corner. My session was supposed to be mid-afternoon, but the agenda turned out to be rather “fluid” in the end. The upshot was that I had to deliver my session much more quickly than anticipated, and I also had to try and re-energise and engage attendees who were probably thinking about other things at this point.
Did it go well? I think it did, and I suspect this won’t be the last such user group session I’m asked to present at. Next time though, I will definitely want a slot much earlier in the schedule.
Automators Podcast Obsidian Vault
I updated my Obsidian vault for the Automators podcast with details for the episodes 158 and 159. It was a bit unusual as episode 157 has been lost due to technical difficulties, so I had to work around a few bits in my automation for helping to build the vault.
The updates include over 50 new pages of content in the Obsidian value, as well as many hundreds of new cross references. I surprised someone (hi Wim 👋🏻) ahead of the Relay event with just how long it took to compile an episode. While I have all the automation in place to streamline creating the episode pages, there is a lot of manual effort to cross-link correctly and check the spelling, meaning, etc. In addition though I am trying to build out all the referenced content. As time passes, this should generally decline a little as topics recur, but there is always something new (which is good). But this means I have to research and build out new pages for each of these. Hence how two episodes generated so many content pages. So keep in mind a couple of episodes actually turns out to be a double digit number of hours of manual effort to build out each time.
One other thing for Marked 2 users is I added a couple of special Templater templates to open Marked 2. While I know there’s a Marked 2 plugin, there’s no ned to install it since we can replicate the core functionality in Templater instead.
Moom-ing
This month I managed to finish one of my new Alfred workflows. This one is called “Moom-ing” and is the moving and zooming Mac app, Moom, by Many Tricks. Now I’m starting to make more use of Bunch, and using more saved layouts in Moom, I crated this workflow to help me with my testing. It currently lets you create, mix, and load windows snapshots as well as save their names.
It is free, so if you are an Alfred user (with a power pack license), and a Moom user, it is worth looking over.
More Bunches
Alongside the work with Moom and setting up new window layout snapshots, I have also been working on further personal bunches for use with Bunch. I am building this out slowly and looking at various scripting elements and ways to reuse bunch content. I’m hoping the system will incorporate nice logical blocks in the end that allow me to develop new bunches even quicker and with more first time reliability.
Mona
For better or worse, every time I launch the Mona app, I’m reminded of the song. Not the original Bo Diddley version, but the Craig McLachlan/Check1–2 version. I can’t help it, I was brainwashed by Top of the Pops as a child.
What is the Mona app? Well, it is the app I’ve settled on at the start of July for my Mastodon use. Since joining Mastodon after the Twitter/X debacle, I have nearly exclusively been using the official Mastodon app and website. However, I felt there was a good chance of a better client app being out there that suited my use better. Ideally one that supported scheduling - something I’ve wanted for some time with mastodon and only found separate solutions for which don’t always perform exactly how you want, particularly when it comes to including photos.
Now, living in the Apple ecosystem in my non-work life, there’s obviously the front runner of Ivory by Tapbots. I was an avid user of Tweetbot once my favoured Osfoora was no more, so it makes sense that Ivory would be the natural successor for me. Except, it isn’t.
Don’t get me wrong, it looks as great as Tweetbot, but it was a rush to launch it, and the feature set has remained, for me, incomplete. It had an amazing pace in the run tip to the launch, but since then it feels like the development for the other features slowed and there are no timelines for delivery.
In the mean time I’ve looked at a variety of common and not so common apps, trying to find something that would be a good match. Unfortunately, this has been a difficult challenge. For some reason, Mastodon client app developers seem to have been happy to not have websites and bullet point some but not all features in an app listing. It is truly astonishing when you begin to dig deep and people start referencing features that simply are not listed anywhere and sometimes they exist, and sometimes they are still in some TestFlight beta somewhere.
The result of my months-long exploration was the selection of Mona. It is a good fit for me, but may not be for you. As well as fulfilling all the usual post (alt text on images, quotes, etc.) and search sort of stuff (including saved searches), and having a solid user interface, there were a few other points that swung it for me.
Mona supports scheduling posts. This feature is a big win for me if I’m wanting to prepare ahead of a blog post releasing or attending an event. I can pre-load content and schedule it to post at the appropriate time.
Mona is multi-platform.
Mona has a price I can afford for use and is a one-off cost, not a subscription.
Mona has Apple Shortcuts support, and that even allows you to schedule posts and reschedule posts. So just imagine being at an event, having some posts scheduled, then the event gets delayed by a half an hour - you can reschedule all of your pending posts in a time frame to add 30 minutes on.
If you haven’t taken a look at Mona, and you are in the market for a new Mastodon app, I would heartily recommend taking a look.
Conductor for Marked 2
Following on from last month’s blog post about Conductor for Marked 2 to use with Drafts, I’ve also been experimenting further with some more advanced pre-processing. This is something I’m expecting to slowly build out to where I want it, and I expect a part 2, touching on some new areas, will be forthcoming at some point.
I have also been looking at doing something with Pandoc on Windows. Not the same as with Marked 2, but there’s a common thread that might come to the fore at some point. It’s a work in progress.
Upcoming
As implied in the section on Moom-ing, I do have another Alfred workflow that is very close to complete and that I had hoped to release to the world at large in July. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite get there on that one. There are some finishing touches I want to get sorted and some documentation to revise. Once they are done, you can expect to see that one make an appearance - I imagine within the next few weeks.
There will inevitably be more Automators Podcast Obsidian Vault updates, episode 160 being well underway, but I’m going to try and work on some of the backlog of things to tidy up and update this next month. If something interesting comes ups, I’m sure I’ll turn some attention to that, but otherwise it will be all about the backlog.
Thank you to everyone who has bought me coffee. Every cup is partaken with my sincere gratitude to you.