As part of my recent switch to a MacBook Air as my main computer, I’ve been on the lookout for interesting third-party apps and utilities to improve my daily usage of macOS. It’s been a few years since I really used a Mac as my primary machine, so I’m a bit rusty on what the...
Fiery Feeds for iOS Added an In-App Split View Mode That I Wish More iPhone Apps Offered
A few weeks ago on Mastodon, I shared a simple feature request: a split-screen mode for iPhone RSS readers that would allow me to scroll headlines in the one half of the screen and preview actual articles in the other.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone: back in 2007, Steve Jobs demoed pretty much the same thing for the first version of the Mail app for iPhone OS 1.0. That layout mode never shipped, and probably rightfully so at the time given the limited screen real estate of the first iPhone.
Everything Old Is New Again: Saving Text to Obsidian from an Apple Watch via a Mac mini, Hazel, and Shortcuts
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...