Keyboard Maestro macro to help with assigning Keyboard Maestro macros

If you use a mac and are into macros, shortcuts, customising things and generally making your computer do the kind of things you want it to do, I strongly recommend giving Keyboard Maestro a whirl.

If you're already using it, you might be familiar with the feeling once you've got your great macro together when you need to figure out how you want to trigger it. There are quite a few strategies out there - using special characters to denote a macro (eg. I use "@@h" as a shortcut for my home email address – apart from ocassionally using class variables when writing code in Ruby, I can't think of any instances where I'm likely to type "@@".) Sometimes, you might double the initial letter (eg. I use "ddate" and "ttime" to insert the current date and time, respectively.)

Once you've got some sort of idea of a trigger you want to use, this is a quick macro to see whether your chosen string of characters is going to appear inside any standard Engligh words.

Its pretty straightforward - I have this triggered when I type "ccheck", and it runs a simple one line shell script, which looks for what you typed into a dictionary file that comes built into most UNIX systems;

If there are no matches, you get a brief alert (which you can safely ignore) telling you that there are no matches. If anything does match, it will pop up in a window to let you know what words contain the string you had typed, so you can then decide whether you care or not.

I'm pretty sure that there will be a cleverer way of going about this (maybe using one of the "proper" OSX dictionaries), but this is more of a quick fix to stop me using something stupid that is going to get accidentally triggered than a guarantee that I'm never, ever going to trigger this by accident.

For example, it tells me that there are 5 words that include "ttime" – but I'm quite confident that I'm never going to type any of them.

One Note for Mac

A couple of months ago, I came across and wrote about Microsoft's OneNote application;

I was digging around the applications that came with a recent work upgrade to Office 2013, and came across OneNote, which I thought might have been interesting. Until I noticed;

OneNote is available for Windows, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Symbian.

So, an application for "free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration" (interesting) that I can't use on my 'main' computer (effectively useless, unless I want to use it through a browser.) Lets suppose that Microsoft have a killer app in the pipeline – what are the chances that they will make a Mac version out of the gate? Seems unlikely.

Well, since then Microsoft released OneNote for Mac.

It seemed like fortuitous timing – it happened that on the same day, my work email moved from Lotus Notes to Outlook, so I'm hoping that a few of my daily pain points around email will disappear (and the inevitable new pain points won't be as bad…) And, having also recently upgraded to Office 2013 a few weeks before, I've got plenty of new tools to play with. So, I've installed OneNote on my own laptop, my phone, and my iPad. (Naturally, I've also installed the new Office apps too – although I haven't yet had a reason to have a proper play and figure out if a 365 subscription is worth my while.)

What am I going to do with it though? Currently, my 'notes' system revolves around a combination of nvALT (Mac), Notepad++ (PC), Nebulous Notes (iPhone/iPad) and a Dropbox folder to tie it all together. The only catch is that its very much text-based – so the idea of a system for 'richer' notes is appealing. (For example, taking notes during a meeting, where I can easily separate out action points from points I want to reference etc.)

The first thing that appeals about OneNote is the free-form-ness of it. More than any other application that comes to mind, it resembles the way I like to use a paper notepad – but without the limitations of space that a paper notepad clearly has.

The second thing that appeals is the idea of collaborative working – I'm a fan of the idea of personal information management, through notes, wikis etc. My biggest frustration with Office documents is the 'read only' message when you ry to open a document that someone else is using. The idea of being able to store my own notes on, say, ways to use a piece of software we use at work that others can also add to is very interesting to me.

So, first impressions – now that its cross-platform, it has become a lot more useful. From a first glance, it looks interesting. (And seeing the icon on the IFTTT page is very encouraging.) So, I'm going to be looking out for ways it might be helpful – whether that means taking a laptop into meetings/presentations, or using a phone/iPad for note taking and then the desktop version for organising/formatting etc. I'm not sure just yet. But worth a whirl...

…except – irony of ironies – my PC version (that is, the non-free, paid-for-by-my-employer version that is part of Microsoft Office, that Outlook is peppered with links to) doesn't work. Or at least, it doesn't work with OneDrive (presumably disabled to keep 'work stuff' under work's control) or Sharepoint (not yet activated while the IT guys deal with the rest of the Outlook/Exchange/Sharepoint transition – I'm hoping…).

So now, in a complete reversal of my previous position, I'm able to make full use of it in a 'personal' capacity (on my own computer, my own phone, and my own tablet), but not in a 'professional' capacity on my work hardware. For a piece of software which, as far as I can see, would be much more valuable to me in a work context than a personal one.

Microsoft's troubles are starting to become a little clearer to me…

Keeping my computer tidy with Hazel

Over the Christmas break, I went on a bit of a tidying and organising mission, clearing up my desk space at home, and clearing up my hard drive.

As anyone knows, the difficult bit isn't tidying up – its maintaining tidiness as you go along. And I thought thats something that I could really do with some help with.

The first thing is setting up some sort of 'system' – ie. what goes where, what do you keep, what do you throw away, what do you archive etc. (My own policy is that I usually don't throw away anything unless I am absolutely certain that it will have no value at any point in the future. This isn't always a good policy — especially when it comes to real world things — but in a digital world where I have a few terabytes worth of drives, backups and external storage, I think it makes sense.)

I tend to find myself with a few folders that gradually become general purpose dumping grounds – which is what I need help with.

Downloads (a massive collection of files that either stay around long after they are useful, while more useful/interesting things get easily lost in the clutter.) Desktop – where I put things while I'm working with but move out again much less frequently.
And Dropbox – a repository of things that I want to be able to access from work, home and mobile devices, but again – the system of putting things in doesn't have much of a 'companion' system for getting them out again.

So, in imposing some sort of order on them, I find myself building 'rules' – I want to keep software I've downloaded, data tables and MS Office files are usually related to work.

Which is what led me to the Hazel app for the Mac. $28 (£17), with a free trial (14 days with full functionality – which should be enough time to figure out if you are going to get any use out of it.)

Basically, its an automated organisation system for the Mac. The interface is simple - in System Preferences, a Hazel pane appears;

Here, I've got 7 folders that Hazel is watching, with 3 rules for my Dropbox folder.

The first rule is called 'Tag recent files' – named, because thats exactly what it does; anything in my Dropbox folder that has been recently modified gets a "Recently Modified" tag. I've also got this set up in Finder as a 'favourite' tag, so at a glance, I can see anything in there that has been recently modified.

It has a companion Rule, which will remove the tag from anything last modified more than a week ago;

So, where before I tried to maintain an "Active" folder of things that I was currently working with (which just ended up turning into yet another general purpose dumping ground), I now click on the Tag in Finder, and I'll see everything that I've been working on in the last week. (I could probably do something with Spotlight instead, but I'm playing with tags for now…)

The downside here is that the tags are Mac OSX only - so none of this organisation is much help on my work PC or iPhone/iPad, but I can live with that for now.

Another rule will pop up a notification to let me know if any large files are taking up space in my Dropbox folder, to help me keep the size down.

Right now, most of my rules are either moving files into some soft of folder organisation, or just throwing tags at files – one of the Mavericks features that I've only just started exploring (again, as a part of my Christmas tidying/organising drive) – I haven't quite figured out whats useful (ie. lets me do something faster, more easily) and whats just interesting (for example, I didn't realise that the download source domain gets saved as part of the file metadata – so, adding those as 'source:url' tags lets me then use that to file – like stuff from certain analysts gets automatically filed away into an 'analysis' folder.)

As far as official documentation goes, Hazel does seem to be a little thin on the ground. However, that said, the interface is simple enough – what is probably more useful is inspiration than direction – there is so much that can be done with Hazel, its more a case of figuring out what would be useful for the way you work (ie. taking care of things you do manually so that you don't have to) than trying to figure out how to go about doing whatever you want to do. Chances are, if Hazel can't do it on its own, then combining Hazel actions with Applescript/shell scripts will get you where you want to be.

A good starter for ideas on the official forums