Last Week, on Club MacStories: An Obsidian Shortcut, the Benefits of Utility Shortcuts, and Two Special Club Podcast Episodes

Because Club MacStories now encompasses more than just newsletters, we’ve created a guide to the past week’s happenings:

MacStories Weekly: Issue 365

Federico's Dashboard note in Obsidian includes an 'On My Mind' section that he prepends notes to using Shortcuts.

Federico’s Dashboard note in Obsidian includes an ‘On My Mind’ section that he prepends notes to using Shortcuts.

Club MacStories+ AV Club Town Hall

Last week, Federico and I were joined by Jonathan Reed to discuss the debut albums of Coldplay and Oasis live in the Club Discord. Club MacStories+ Discord members picked Coldplay’s Parachutes, and Federico picked Oasis’ Definitely Maybe in honor of MacStories’ anniversary last week. Club MacStories+ and Premier members can listen to the event in the Town Hall podcast feed.

Club MacStories+ Automation April Shortcuts Workshop, Part 2

We threw a second live Automation April Shortcuts workshop in Discord last week with special guest Rosemary Orchard where we explained our approaches to building new shortcuts, when to build utility functions called from other shortcuts, our recent shortcuts experiments, and projects. The event is also available in the Town Hall podcast feed.

Streaks: The to-Do List That Helps You Form Good Habits [Sponsor]

Streaks is one of the best-known habit-tracking apps on the App Store. In addition to linking to the Health app to help improve your health and wellbeing, you can use it for anything! Work, hobbies, exercise, timers, and more - it’s extremely customizable.

We’ve just released Streaks 9 with some great new features:

  • Screen Time tasks that automatically monitor your device usage
  • An all-new Apple Watch app, now written in SwiftUI
  • You can now record daily notes with your tasks
  • New great-looking neon themes

Streaks has now been in the App Store for 8 years - if you haven’t tried it before, or it’s been a while since you used it, we hope you can check it out!

Our thanks to Streaks for sponsoring MacStories this week.

MacStories Unwind: How I Met Your Father, Pokémon Scarlet, and Rabbit Hole

AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps
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AppStories+ Deeper into the world of apps

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:

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.

Read more

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.
[Subscribe here.](https://www.macstories.net/podcasts/appstories/plans)

Subscribe here.

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 has 14 Shortcuts actions.

Bike has 14 Shortcuts actions.

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.

Exporting all rows as plain text.

Exporting all rows as plain text.

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.