MacStories Weekly: Issue 365
MacStories Unwind: How I Met Your Father, Pokémon Scarlet, and Rabbit Hole
This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico started watching How I Met Your Father, season 2, on Hulu, which in itself is a minor miracle from Italy, and picked up Pokémon Scarlet again, while I stumbled across Rabbit Hole, an action/thriller/conspiracy show on Paramount+ starring Keifer Sutherland.
Federico’s Picks:
- How I Met Your Father, Season 2
- Pokémon Scarlet
John’s Pick:
Automation April: Hyperduck Leverages the Power of URL Schemes to Control Your Mac from an iPhone or iPad
Hyperduck is a recent utility from Sindre Sorhus for sending URLs from an iPhone or iPad to your Mac that has some very interesting applications. Hyperduck hasn’t replaced my use of AirDrop, Handoff, and other Apple technologies that move data between devices, but it has extended those features in meaningful ways and has quickly worked its way into my everyday computing life.
Hyperduck does just one thing very well. It sends URLs from an iPhone or iPad to a Mac using iCloud. That’s different than how AirDrop works, which has some advantages.
Club MacStories+ AV Club Town Hall, Parachutes by Coldplay and Definitely Maybe by Oasis
Automation April 2023: Shortcuts Workshop, Part 2
AppStories, Episode 325 – Automation April: Third-Party Apps with Great Shortcuts Support→
This week on AppStories, we dig into third-party apps with excellent shortcuts support.
Sponsored by:
- Viso – Beautiful minimal image viewer for macOS.
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On AppStories+, My Mac Studio is in the shop, so Federico and I are both using MacBook Airs.
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Automation April: Mac Outliner Bike Adds Shortcuts Support
Last spring, I reviewed Bike, Jesse Grosjean of Hog Bay Software’s excellent outlining app for the Mac. The app’s simple, elegant design keeps the focus on the outline you’re creating, while its rich, keyboard-driven set of features enable ideas to be organized quickly and efficiently. Advanced features, like versioning, linking and grouping rows, and a long list of ways to view, navigate and edit your outlines, make Bike one of the best ways to create outlines on the Mac.
Bike’s focus on efficiency and extensive support for keyboard shortcuts and AppleScript make it the perfect candidate for Shortcuts support, which was added to the app today. Version 1.11 of Bike adds 14 Shortcuts actions to the app:
- Create Outline
- Open Outline
- Open Row
- Get Rows
- Fold Rows
- Focus Row
- Edit Rows
- Import Rows
- Export Rows
- Find Rows
- Create Row
- Delete Rows
- Move Rows
- Get Selection
The actions cover a lot of the functionality of Bike with a focus on outlines, text and row selections, and rows. Outlines can be created from scratch or existing ones opened, and Get Selection returns any selected text and its outline row.
The remainder of Bike’s Shortcuts actions apply to rows, the building blocks of outlines. Rows can be opened in-app or retrieved in a variety of ways, such as by their root, row ID, focus, selection, ancestor rows, child rows, and descendant rows by using the Get Rows action. There’s also a Find Rows action that uses predicate filtering to allow rows matching multiple criteria to be located and sorted. Rows can be imported and exported in Bike, OPML, and plain text formats too.
Rows can also be created, edited, deleted, and moved within an outline with precision, thanks to a detailed set of action parameters. Actions for focusing on particular rows and folding and unfolding rows round out the available actions by allowing users to use Shortcuts to prepare their outline work environment automatically.
I’ve only just begun experimenting with Bike’s new Shortcuts integration, but it’s clear that thanks to extensive parameter and predicate filtering, the automation opportunities are extensive. Especially if you work with big outlines that require frequent, repetitive edits, Bike’s new Shortcuts integration could save you a lot of time.
Bike 1.11 is available on the App Store and directly from Hog Bay Software as a free download. Some features, including Shortcuts support, require a $2.99/month or $19.99/year subscription from the App Store or a one-time license purchase directly from Hog Bay Software, which comes with one year of updates.
You can also follow MacStories’ Automation April coverage through our dedicated hub, or subscribe to its RSS feed.
Last Week, on Club MacStories: The Making of S-GPT, Our First Automation April Workshop, a Club-wide Discount, and Lots of App Coverage
Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings:
The Making of S-GPT, Part 1: Using the ChatGPT API with Apple’s Shortcuts App to Have Conversations with OpenAI’s Assistant
Last week saw the return of Federico’s Automation Academy column for Club MacStories+ and Premier members. The latest edition dug into the techniques Federico used to build S-GPT, his shortcut that integrates OpenAI’s Chat-GPT with Apple’s OSes.
Federico’s column is a deep dive into working with web APIs in shortcuts, navigating JSON dictionaries, and the clever way S-GPT stores its ongoing conversation in a variable. Whether you’re working with ChatGPT’s API or another web API, the column is a great place to learn how to to hook your shortcuts up to web APIs.
Automation April: Shortcuts Workshop, Part 1
Last week we also held our first Automation April workshop where Federico and I were joined by Jack Wellborn, who won Best Overall Shortcut in last year’s Automation April Shortcuts Contest, to talk about tips for coming up with shortcuts ideas, our recent shortcuts experiments and projects, incorporating AppleScript and other techniques into Mac-based Shortcuts, and more.
Alerty: A New Club-Wide Discount
In MacStories Weekly 364, we announced a new Club-wide discount from our friends at Alerty, a push notification service. Alerty’s incredibly easy-to-use web API allows you to generate rich push notifications to any of your Apple devices. They can be used to extend Shortcuts’ notification system, triggered by server events, and more.
Members can get 50% off on a monthly or annual subscription by visiting the Club Discounts page.
MacStories Weekly: Issue 364
- A review of Button Creator for Stream Deck
- Apps to extend your Shortcuts experience on Mac
- A GoodLinks giveaway
- A tip on how to read the contents of Markdown files in Shortcuts
- Plus:
- App Debuts
- Highlights from the Club MacStories+ Discord
- Interesting links from around the web
- A sneak peek at what’s next on MacStories’ podcasts
- and more
MenuBar Stats: Advanced System Monitoring [Sponsor]
MenuBar Stats is a suite of 9 menu bar modules for monitoring your Mac developed over the course of 10 years of listening carefully to customer feedback. The app tracks your Mac’s:
- Battery
- Bluetooth
- CPU
- Disk
- GPU
- Memory
- Network
- And, with a helper app, your Mac’s temperature and fan speed
The app, which is highly customizable, provides essential details, with even more extensive information just a click away. Modules can be combined into a single window, displayed as individual windows, and anchored to always be visible. The stats monitored are available as a collection of more than 10 widgets and accessible through MenuBar Stats’ Shortcuts actions. The app has been extensively tested on and tuned for Apple’s latest M1 and M2-based Macs and includes a tool to clean your Mac’s memory too.
MenuBar Stats goes beyond monitoring and reporting with the ability to set up notifications to alert you of the details that matter most to you and even run shortcuts from them. Whether that’s when your battery reaches a certain level or when there’s a process that is monopolizing your CPU, MenBar Stats can alert you, so you’ll know the moment your Mac needs your attention.
Acting on those notifications couldn’t be simpler. MenuBar Stats can take you to a long list of Mac system utilities from your menu bar or using global keyboard shortcuts that you define. There’s also backup and restore functionality, so you can recreate your carefully-crafted setup anywhere.
It’s easy to see why MenuBar Stats has an average rating of 4.5 stars worldwide. Download MenuBar Stats today to see for yourself why so many people rely on it to monitor their Macs.
Our thanks to MenuBar Stats for sponsoring MacStories this week.