In late 2012, when I was starting to dip my toes into the beautiful world of iOS automation, I shared an elaborate system to save PDFs to Evernote running on a remote Mac mini by leveraging Pythonista, Dropbox, Hazel, and AppleScript to make it all happen with the press of a single button. The details...
Return to macOS
John
Moving Windows with a Three-Finger Drag on macOS
In setting up my new MacBook Air, I remembered that the Mac used to have a way to enable a multitouch-based, non-click drag method that only required you to hold down three fingers on the trackpad. As I discovered, this option still exists, but it’s somewhat hidden in the new System Settings app. To find...
Prepending Text to a Section of My ‘Dashboard’ Note in Obsidian
In late 2021, I wrote about my system for appending text and links to a ‘Dashboard’ note in Obsidian and shared a fairly complex shortcut that dealt with appending text at the end of specific sections in that note. Over the past few months – and especially following an experiment with Notion – I realized...
Automation April: Third-Party Apps with Great Shortcuts Support
Shortcut Workshop, Rating Songs with Shortcuts and AppleScript, a YouTube Subscription Shortcut, and Focus Modes
Here are the highlights from the Club MacStories Discord this week: Jack Wellborn, the winner of last year’s Automation April Shortcuts Contest who also joined us for a Shortcuts workshop on Discord this week, shared two samples of AppleScript for UI automation to speed up message editing in Slack and Discord. Jack also shared two...
Reading the Contents of Markdown Files with Shortcuts
I was recently updating an old shortcut for appending text to a note in Obsidian, and I kept getting an error when trying to fetch the text contents of Markdown files stored in Finder. All my code was correct, and I couldn’t figure out why Shortcuts for Mac was returning the plain text filename of...
The Making of S-GPT: Using the ChatGPT API with Apple’s Shortcuts App to Have Conversations with OpenAI’s Assistant
Last week on MacStories, I published S-GPT, an advanced shortcut for ChatGPT that lets you have conversations with OpenAI’s powerful assistant while also leveraging native integrations on Apple platforms. S-GPT supports native functionalities of iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS such as the system clipboard, Live Text, Reminders and Calendar, and even playlists in the Music...
Read moreS-GPT 1.0.2 Brings Date and Time Awareness, Integration with macOS Services Menu, Passthrough Mode, Better HomePod Support, and More
I just published version 1.0.2 of S-GPT, the shortcut I released last week to have conversations with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and integrate it directly with native features of Apple’s OSes. You can find the updated download link at the end of this post, in the original article, and in the MacStories Shortcuts Archive; before you replace version 1.0.1 of S-GPT, save your existing OpenAI API key somewhere as you’ll have to paste it again in the shortcut later.
I’m going to include the full changelog for S-GPT 1.0.2 below, but long story short: S-GPT is now aware of the current date and time, and I’ve heard all the requests about improving interactions with the HomePod and Siri, so I made that part much better. S-GPT can now perform a variety of date/time calculations with natural language, and you can end a conversation by saying “no” or “stop”.