It was developed around one core feature, allowing it be polished, reliable, and extremely efficient. Safari on devices where Pinner isnt installed - including Macs running OS X Yosemite.Thumbtack is a menu-bar utility that provides quick and easy access to the most recently saved bookmarks in your Pinboard account. Spotlight made some big jumps in OS X Yosemite (literally).I’ve had this article on the back burner for almost three years now, but for the next thrilling instalment of my productivity app blogs, I’ll be turning to look at Keyboard Maestro.The best Pinboard app for iOS - The Sweet Setup Pinner is a fast. With this out-of-the-box functionality ready to go, it is the first search tool a new Mac user is exposed to, but I’d like to think that it serves as the training wheels to more powerful utilities. Having Spotlight built-in to OS X has its advantages.However, after months years of sustained use, my feelings towards Keyboard Maestro have completely changed. The learning curve is steep, and the documentation pretty unclear – especially when compared to the other productivity apps that are available. I have to admit to being wary when I first tried it out. Want to see the window all the time, Little Bookmark Box can automatically hide itself if another app is activated.Don’t let the somewhat dated website put you off, the app itself is unbelievably powerful.Instead, it’s an app that’s best for repetitive tasks that are very specific to each user’s needs, which makes it difficult to give good examples. Firstly, there aren’t so many general use cases for Keyboard Maestro – at least not for me. I honestly don’t know what I would do without it at this point.So if Keyboard Maestro is so great, why did it take me so long to publish this? Well, there’s a few reasons.You get a lot of control from the get go. Whether that’s telling the mouse to move and click on a certain point, displaying a popup message, getting an image size, filling in a field on a website, or whatever. The key difference is that instead of having to write Applescript for every action you want to complete (which is still an option, by the way), there are a whole bunch of options baked in.
App Like Pinboard Mac User IsKeyboard Maestro is there to help you automate pretty much any task that you can think of.In addition to the automation, there is a whole host of other cool features that you can do a deep dive into – such as an extensive multi clipboard manager, application switcher, and others – but for me the real glory lies in the macros. However, that isn’t the point of Keyboard Maestro. The UI is not the most intuitive, and you’d be forgiven for giving up at the beginning purely on that basis alone.If you want to carry out simple, general tasks, then there may well be a nicer app that lets you do those things. Do you need to convert HTML to markdown? Use a macro. Do you have to fill out specific fields on a website more than once? Use a macro. Once you do sit down and give it some attention though, you’ll soon come up with plenty. It takes a conscious effort to work out what tasks you could automate – which isn’t necessarily something you thought was possible beforehand. Select a certain option to mark the issue as ‘Resolved’ or ‘On Hold’.All of these steps are fairly straightforward, but a lot of time is taken up by clicking through the same tasks for each – even when I use a textexpander or snippet manager like Alfred. Reply by copying a specific part of the original message, and quoting it back in a certain format before providing an appropriate response. Note down the action taken in certain circumstances. Find the website URL in the e-mail and open it. Each one (generally) requires me to: The possibilities are endless.As part of my job, I regularly have to review and respond to reports about different websites using a helpdesk system. Marking the issue Resolved or On Hold as appropriate.The only thing Keyboard Maestro doesn’t do is decide what action to take – which is just as well really, for a variety of reasons!Like many of the examples, that one is very specific, but it demonstrates a bit of how granular and useful Keyboard Maestro macros can be – and will hopefully get you thinking about your own use cases. Adding whatever notes needed to track the action taken in a specific field. Pasting the URLs in the correct quoted format at the top of the reply, along with the appropriate response. Extracting all of the URLs from the messages, and opening them in new windows. However, with Keyboard Maestro, I can reduce this all to a couple of key presses, with a couple of macros doing all of the following: Copying the current URL from my browser window (and doing stuff with it).The most powerful and useful ones are those that have very specific, work related use cases. Pasting items in a bulleted or numbered list automatically. Parsing blocks of text to extract URLs and/or e-mail addresses. Pasting text with different styles of quotes depending on the situation. Inserting a URL wrapped in a href tags. Execute commands remotely by running Keyboard Maestro on a server? Why not. If you want certain changes to happen when you connect to a particular WiFi, you can make that happen. Pretty much any event you can think of can kick off a macro. There are a few different ways you can bookmark with Alfred, but I didn’t quite find that any of them matched what I was looking for.First, I tried using the ‘web search’ feature to associate bookmarks with particular keywords. What I’ve Tried BeforeThe closest I’ve come to finding an answer is in Alfred, which I’ve blogged about before. The in-browser features don’t really make it easy to quickly find common URLs, and I’ve tried to use other websites in the past, but they just didn’t seem to stick in my mind. It’s something I’ve always struggled to find a good solution to. You can even have Keyboard Maestro react to MIDI notes and values, which opens up a whole world of interesting hardware controllers aside from the keyboard… something I’ll be exploring in the next post.Bookmarking. Ps2 emulator auf macHowever, if you already use the Snippet Manager for predefined replies – more like a clipboard manager – then having a large number of bookmarks in there could pollute the results, increasing the time it takes to find the things you need effectively.I set out to find an alternative, and made use of my old Delicious account to create a workflow that could search through my bookmarks by making use of the private RSS feed. This could be a really good solution, as you would be able to search by the title and description that you enter, as well as the content of the actual URL itself. As as a result, it isn’t all that great for keeping track of lots of different locations.Another solution was to use the Alfred Snippet Manager. Call up the interface with a hotkey, and you can search through all of your bookmarks in an interface that is awfully similar in feel and operation to Alfred.The similarity isn’t a criticism, as Alfred is amazing. The $11 is worth the money. Personally, I use the latter – as Delicious keeps making changes to their service which break things. You simply set it up to connect to a Delicious (free), Pinboard ($11 annually) account, or both. That meant that I didn’t ever really make use of it.The real solution came in the form of a different app altogether… ShioriI stumbled upon Shiori completely by chance, and was surprised I hadn’t seen it mentioned anywhere before.Both the website and the app itself are beautifully simple, and easy to use. Because it uses your login details (and doesn’t just pull it from the RSS like my hacky method above), it’s really fast too.There’s also a hotkey that can be set to bookmark new websites quickly from the browser. Like Alfred, the more you use the app, the smarter it gets – picking up on the type of searches you use most commonly to find particular bookmarks.
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