Automators

In this episode Rose and David dive into their very first feedback show. There's a quick look at what changed since the podcast started, a sneak peak of some of the upcoming episode topics, and much more including a brand new app - Scriptable, and automating timers!

Keep your eye on the Twitter account @LaunchCenterPro for beta sign ups!

iOS power user Matthew Cassinelli joins us to share some great iOS automation workflows.

Matthew Cassinelli

In this episode, we are joined by former Workflow team member Matthew Cassinelli. Matthew is an iOS power user with a ton of knowledge about Workflow and Siri Shortcuts. In this episode, Matthew shares a few workflows.

The first workflow lets you sort through your Twitter lists and display them. This intermediate workflow uses variables and selections. On the episode, we walk through every step and why Matthew used it.

If you shoot pictures or video, you may know you get some of your best photos an hour after sunrise and an hour before sunset. The trouble is accessing sunrise/sunset time in Workflow was traditionally tricky. Matthew put together a Workflow that hooks into the darksky.net API to pull the data from the Internet. This is an advanced workflow, but again, we walk it through one step at a time. Download the workflow, listen to the episode, and you’re good.

This is a great episode that runs deep on Workflow/Siri Shortcuts.

Alex Cox and Matthew make sense out of technology

See Rose's take on Matthew's Golden Hour script.

David said the Siri Shortcut Field Guide was coming. Well ... it's here ... with an introductory price discount.

In this episode of Automators David and Rose get nerdy with project templates. They start out with what a project template is and how it can help you, and go through using basic project templates all the way up to more complex options. While both of them are OmniFocus users, project templates can be used in any task management system - and is something that everyone can use.

A comic demonstrating when automation actually pays off.

A comic showing how you can spend more time automating things than time you gave - but as said in the podcast this isn't always the case!

In this example, David demonstrates how to build a Siri Shortcut Script to create a new project template in OmniFocus.

Contains 45 minutes of material for project templates

Take a project with «variables» and replace those with words and create a new project with AppleScript

In this screencast Rose demonstrates how to use the action group she created for Drafts to create a project for OmniFocus.

The action group that Rose created in Drafts to enable easy TaskPaper creation and manipulation.

Dynamic creation of an essay project for OmniFocus

Dynamic creation of an essay project for Things

The packing list app Rose uses

A podcast hosted by Joe Buehlig and Mike Schmitz in which they review books.

From episode 1, Rose demonstrates the numbers sheet and Keyboard Maestro Macro you can use to bulk add lots of similar events to your calendar.

Colter shows you how you can build project templates (for OmniFocus but you could also translate this to Things) in AppleScript and offers example scripts too.

Rose and David have been busy trying out the Siri Shortcuts beta. This episode looks closely at how Siri Shortcuts is better (and worse) than Workflow along with some hopes for where this is all heading.

Because he can't help himself, David kicks off the show taking credit for the existence of Siri Shortcuts because … well … why not? Rose quickly gets on board with the idea. Then our hosts dive in deep on Siri Shortcuts, the banner automation features that will ship with iOS 12.

This is a great collection of Shortcuts which many people have already made.

Rose's Shortcut for Flight Time, hosted on Sharecuts

In this episode we sat down with Sal Soghoian to learn how to use AppleScript to turn a Numbers table, column, or row, into a chart in Keynote. We also dove into the history of AppleScript, what parts of it mean, and how you can learn it too.

Sal Soghoian

This is an episode where you'll want to bring your Mac, and make sure to visit Sal's page to download all the goodies too!

Sal Soghoian, the father of automation on the Mac, joins Katie and David to discuss the state of Mac an iOS automation. Sal discusses the history of Automation on the Mac, the possibilities for Automation on iOS and the tools and languages available to put the power in the hands of the user.

If you want to learn about automation on the Mac, this a great place to get started. You'll find links to all of Sal's other sites here too.

All about automating Apple Configurator with Automator and more.

An alternative to Script Editor for your Mac.

A 3 day course with Sal and Ray where you can learn AppleScript together. Make sure to listen to the show to get a discount of $200 when booking your ticket!

If you want to learn about automating OmniGraffle or OmniOutliner with OmniJS, then this is the official website.

If you enjoyed the example of taking a table in Numbers and converting it into a chart in Keynote and would like to automate more things with the iWork suite of applications then this is the place to start!

Join us to talk about the episode, dissect the AppleScript, and nerd out about automation.

In this episode, our intrepid Automators dive into email and cover the best ways to get your Mac, iOS devices, and the web wrangling your email for you.

David keeps talking about all the subjects for Automators but settles on email for episode 2. Rose and David agree the emails you send do not need to all be special snowflakes.

David throws out TextExpander as the starting point because saving snippets in a Word document is madness. David likes automating the tab key when writing an email.

Both David and Rose use Automator on the Mac but agree it should be more powerful. Very quickly Rose presses on to Keyboard Maestro. Rose then explains how she uses a Keyboard Maestro script to look for the existence of a file to automatically assemble and send an email. David gets irrationally happy about the thought of email getting sent without any direct involvement.

Then our nerdy automators take on sorting email. Both of our hosts get too much pleasure from auto sorting unwanted email out of their life. David bangs on about a years-old request to make Apple’s cloud-based email rules stronger. David mentions his beloved AppleScript that auto inserts an email recipient’s name.

The Omni Group sponsored this show, and Rose and David agree that they’re swell.

Then Rose and David move on to iOS email automation. The way email apps make you create email links to only their apps makes David sad but Rose digs it. Then David subtly pitches a reality show about two Italians in the middle of a vineyard. Rose then admits she has a thing about email clients and once installed 28 of them.

And then they get to Workflow. So much talking about Workflow. Ultimately, David admits to being “that guy”.

Then our hosts address cloud-based automation, and David closes up banging the drum about dictation and email. Rose and David both love the secret Drafts unending dictation tool. If you’re reading this and you’re from Apple, move along. This is not the app you’re looking for.

Starting with (complex) repeats, working all the way up to AppleScript - with examples. We take you through approximately 10 ways to automate calendar events!

After lots of planning, Rose and David get to roll up their sleeves and start automating. Their first subject is those elusive calendar events that take so long to create. (So many presses and clicks!)

First, they agree that repeating events can actually be a form of automation, especially when you take it to the next level. David is obsessive about hyper-scheduling and, as a result, needs to make a lot of calendar events. He does it all using automation. Rose doesn’t like to remember directions to her dentist and, as a result, made a wicked Workflow workflow. Around this point, David opines that he could solve his travel-time problem with a Workflow (and after recording, actually created the nerdy solution and added it to show notes).

Rose figured out a way to use a combination of Numbers, Fantastical, and Keyboard Maestro on Mac to bulk create a LOT of calendar events and this marks the first instance of AppleScript, albeit a short one, for the first time to the podcast.

Around this time, our hosts wander into cloud services and pay homage to IFTTT and Zapier.

Then they wrap up, having given you, dear listener, a pile of ways to avoid ever manually creating a calendar event again.

This blog post contains all of the links, downloads, and screencasts for the various automations discussed in this episode.

Discuss the episode and examples on our forum.

Here you can find all of our screencasts (including the Memoji video from episode 0).

This workflow can pair with one of the next two to create an event in your calendar and also a slightly longer event in your work calendar.

This Workflow asks if the previous event you created (triggered by the last workflow) is in working time and if so adds a longer event to your work calendar.

This one does the same as the above Workflow, except it's 100% automated - no questions needed!

How MacSparky schedules some of his events from the above hyper-scheduling.

The workflow covered in the above screencast.

Rose shows you how you can use Workflow to copy a calendar event.

The workflow from the above screencast.

How to use that crazy number sheet and Keyboard Maestro to create potentially hundreds of events with Fantastical.

A workflow to replace the above Keyboard Maestro macro - should you be working on iOS.

David breaks down his Workflow which adds travel time to and from events for you.

Welcome to Automators! In this preview episode David Sparks and Rosemary Orchard tell you all about their new podcast, why they love automation, and that yes, you can automate things!

We went a little crazy and did a video version of episode 0 with Memoji heads!

Here you'll find not only the Memoji video, but also screencasts we make to accompany episodes.

Chat about every episode and automation!