This past month has been a slog. The day job is drawing more of my time as demerger and divestment deadlines cluster, people have more and more queries, the realisation of the scale of change settles in, and the usual day job stuff continues to surface. I’m no stranger to working longer days, but right now I just constantly feel drained. Fortunately I have a break scheduled in August, so it won’t be long until I get a reprieve to recharge the mental batteries and spend some more time doing fun things with the family.
Until then, it’s on with the monthly round-up.
ThoughtAsylum
Over on my blog there I put out a couple of new posts this month. The first of these is proudly my post on the new Stream Deck plugin I was working on, which I wrote about in my June round-up. It was approved around the middle of the month by Elgato and is now available on the marketplace.
The new plugin also has a new website behind it - streamdeckstash.thoughtasylum.com. Actually the site is to allow me to share more Stream Deck resources, but I’m all prepared for the future on this one. Once again I’ve built it on Jekyll, and applied a heavily customised theme and incorporated some extra goodies to hook it into an issue tracker on GitHub.
The plugin itself, known as “Mac Automation”, is designed as a solution to my own automation needs on macOS and my hope is that it will meet the automation needs of others too. The plugin documentation covers all the details, but if you check out the blog post, you can read more about why I created the plugin and also get some bonus scripts.
The second blog post relates to my day job, and SAP SuccessFactors Learning, an enterprise learning management system. In it, I describe how I utilised a set of JavaScript to dynamically route the user to different locations. It is not a deep dive into complex JavaScript, but rather a way to use an undocumented feature (as in SAP have not provided any documentation for it beyond a bullet point) to make administration easier in a world of environment copy backs. Nerdy SuccessFactors Learning admins and implementation consultants will love it, and day-to-day admins just get to use it and not worry about it.
I actually wrote this up ahead of a SuccessFactors Learning special interest group (SIG) session I will be taking part in during September. Everything else I can cover in the session, but this bit of scripting required its own detailed walkthrough that I’ll then have a link to in the session. So, if anyone from the SIG actually happens to be reading this ahead of September, you’ll see me talking about this and more on that call.
Forums
Just a handful of postings on the usual forums this month as the Automators forum continues to just exist in the background, and most of the Drafts forum conversations being focused on testing the beta releases for the new *26 operating systems.
Drafts
A feature request for MCP server support in Drafts for macOS highlights some future potential.
There was some discussion of Markdown, rich text, and e-mail in Drafts.
Someone resurrected and ancient discussion on JavaScript utility code between actions, after a link had rotted - and this extended into a bit of new discourse on the options.
I made a suggestion for someone wanting to manually send a draft to a different iCloud account.
Automators
I pointed a forum user to some time frame identification work in Shortcuts to help with an out of bed triggers follow-up question.
I gave some mentions for my new Stream Deck plugin in response to someone having trouble with Stream Deck 5.1 and Keyboard Maestro macros, and a dedicated topic about the plugin
Other
It has been a quieter month for other projects given the impact of the day job on my time, but there have been a couple of notable ones ongoing.
Conductor for Keyboard Maestro
The first one is a new version of Conductor, my Alfred workflow for Keyboard Maestro. In fact there were two new versions, but the second one was a small feature enhancement to the more significant prior example.
A request from a Conductor user triggered a flurry of experimentation and a new release with lots of new features relating to recent macros. Recently run macros (with an exclusion list to filter out those background ones that trigger frequently), last run from Conductor, last edited macro, and various ways to interact with them. The release also (finally) includes a full set of configurable keywords. Definitely worth grabbing the update from the Conductor page.
However, that isn’t all that’s packed into this release. The workflow includes a couple of additional flows that will be making their way into other workflows in due course.
The first is the “Extras” workflow. Most people will probably never notice this, but some of my workflows have lists in to additional ‘extra’ resources that they might be interested in.
The content is now built entirely from a JSON file (which actually lets me maintain the configuration outside the reusable actions), and it dynamically builds links to other workflows by removing itself from a reusable list of all workflows in another JSON file.
That is all well and good as something that will make my maintenance and consistency across workflows that bit easier, but the next one is something that will make things better for everyone. A new automated update process.
At this point many of you may have some questions. The first of these is likely to be, “why don’t you put all your workflows in the Alfred gallery and use their update process?” Well the reason is that the gallery isn’t geared up for my workflows. The folks over at Running With Crayons want to check each workflow by hand. That’s entirely their prerogative, and I support their right to do that, but it proved not to be scalable and particularly when it comes to them understanding and validating my workflows. Many of my workflows are sophisticated and not every workflow I submitted made it into the gallery (some did) - some just got left unchecked. As a result I ended up returning to publishing my workflows directly to users. It’s like using the Mac App Store is easier, but some of the time, you can only get apps straight from the developer because they wouldn’t make it into the App Store.
Now some of you might also say, “but your Doctor Drafts workflow already has an update mechanism in it.” That is true, and while I was very happy to get it working, it was only ever created for use in Doctor Drafts (my Alfred workflow for working with Drafts). It works well, but I knew at some point I would spend some time working on something better.
The new update mechanism in Conductor I believe does just that. I won’t go into the details of how it works, but if you download the workflow, you can obviously poke around the details yourself. A notable change for this is rather than hosting the downloads on thoughtasylum.com, they will now be hosted directly on a GitHub repo, and in time this will act as the source for updates to all of my Alfred workflows.
I also forgot to mention last month that I released a new version of Bypass, my Alfred workflow for Apple Shortcuts with a few fixes and additional options for accessing shortcut UUIDs - this was intentional to tie in to some Shortcuts functionality in the Mac Automation Stream Deck plugin.
Text to Audio
Something I have been experimenting with this month is converting text to audio and getting this into a playlist for me on my phone. I have something that is working pretty well, but I am not in a position to share exactly what I am doing yet. I have a little more script development to do, and I might then put it into a multipart set of blog posts. It isn’t overly complex to put together, or at least it shouldn’t be once I have smoothed all the rough edges, but I think it covers a variety of elements that could all interesting as standalone elements.
With luck, this will be something I will be able to share in blog posts in August, but it is early days on actually getting things into a fit state to write up and having time to write it up.
A Hex Bolt Connector for Underware
If you have been following my summary posts this year, you will know that my home office desk is decked out not only on the top, but also the bottom. I have 3D printed lots of Underware 2.0 components - Underware being a Multiboard-based cable management solution. I have a few custom elements I created to help me with that, and this past month, right at the end, I managed to get around to posting one of them.
This is probably the smallest 3D print model I have come up with to date (though not the smallest I have printed), and is a hexagonal bolt with a screw thread to mount cable channels in snap connectors. Now if you are not familiar with this cable management system, that won’t mean anything to you. But if you are familiar with it, then you might start to imagine why having the option to utilise this alongside the usual threaded snap connector could be beneficial.
If you want to understand more about why it’s useful, and when it should be used, you can check out the description on the download page at Makerworld.
Upcoming
Other than looking at the text to spoken audio work a little more, I am not sure what I will be working on this coming month. Work will continue to be very busy, and I will try and take a good break from all my commitments this month as I take some, hopefully well deserved, rest. If Identify any quick to deliver updates for one of my Alfred workflows I will likely deploy that using some new standardised flows. But, I have various background projects calling to me such as continuing to write up my notes on 3D printing, the Automators Podcast Obsidian vault, and even my Apple Shortcuts Library could do with some additions.
One additional thing I have been wondering is if people would be interested in me adding a new section to this monthly share? During my month I do end up coming across interesting websites and tools (apps, extensions, plugins, etc.), and I know lots of people do share this sort of thing on in their own newsletters and dedicated posts. Is that something that would add value for people? If so, let me know. You can reach out via Mastodon, or leave a comment below the post if you are reading this in your browser.
All that remains is to thank you all once again for following along and of course to everyone who has donated a coffee. As a daily consumer of this dark beverage I really do appreciate it.