Posts with the Automators tag

This week on Automators I turned into a robot! Just kidding, but David and I took a deep dive into how I do a lot of the nerdy things I’m up to every day.

As well as diving into a whole bunch of geeky awesomeness, we also launched Automators Max which is part of the Relay FM membership program. As well as ad free episodes of Automators and a members only after show (this time it’s about me hacking some door sensors), you’ll also get access to the Relay FM member’s only Discord server, access to Crossover with member’s only Relay FM special episodes, exclusive wallpapers, and more.

On the latest episode of Automators with Mikah Sargent, we went down a little bit of a rabbit hole with my RocketBook. After the show, both Sparky and Mikah decided to give it a try! Since then I’ve been contacted by a few people asking about my RocketBook, so here are the full details.

In today’s episode of Automators, Scotty Jackson, my co-host on Nested Folders crossed over into the parallel universe of automation to talk to David and myself about how he’s using Shortcuts to log, commuicate, and even handle complex project management across multiple systems!

In this episode of Automators, David and I interviewed Charlie Chapman, host of Launched, and creator of Dark Noise, about adding automation to your life with a little white noise, and the process and benefits of adding support for Shortcuts to apps.

In this week’s episode of Automators, David and I dove into our pile of feedback. As well as looking at Launchcuts, we also looked a how you can file feedback when things are broken on iOS (as some actions break in Shortcuts from time to time!), and reviewed our Streamdeck setup and more.

In episode 44, David and I spoke to Doug Adams, the man behind Doug’s Scripts, about AppleScript, automating Music, and more!

In this episode of Autmators, David and I took a headlong plunge into automating our capture and review processes. As we mentioned on the show, automated capture is a double-edged sword - capturing too much can lead to overwhelm, but I also find automated capture to be a problem solver as then I don’t have to do the actual capturing myself, something that could be dangerous!

Toolbox Pro developer (and documentary film editor) Alex Hay joins us to explain how he stumbled from scratching his own itch to making a powerful Siri Shortcuts utility app, Toolbox Pro.

In this week’s episode of Automators, David and I dove into health tracking. As it’s the start of the year I’ve been trying to figure out what my health goals are - but I couldn’t let them get away from me without a little automation!

Tim Stringer from LearnOmniFocus.com joined us on Automators to talk about his Mac, iOS, and web-based automation.

On this week’s episode of Automators, David and I dove into the wonderful world of iBeacons! We explored our uses for these handy location triggers including taking them on the road with us. As well as this, we looked at which iBeacons really work for us, and what apps give you the most benefit.

On this week’s episode of Automators we got to tallk to Simon Leeb, creator of Pushcut. As well as diving into the origins of Pushcut, we also explored Simon’s home automation setup before wandering into the wonderful world of iBeacons!

In this week’s episode David and I talked to Sal Soghoian to find out how we can use an accessibility feature on the Mac, custom keyboards, to do almost anything - including building a Keynote deck for us!

In episode 37 of Automators David and I got our enchanted brooms ready and went to town on maintaining and managing your Mac. We did our best to get out all the cobwebs and find a way to automate all of this, while there may not be a robot vacuum for your Mac, there are plenty of tools you can use to make the magic happen automatically - good whether it’s your system or one you end up managing because the owner relies on you to do it!

In the latest episode of Automators David and I got a chance to talk to Don McAllister about the systems and processes he has built over the years to automate ScreenCastsOnline. As a recent addition to their team, it was a fun look behind that side of the curtain, and I hope the system and processes Don has in place will inspire you!

When David first talked about doing a show on Regular Expressions I confess I was a little nervous, how do you explain something so text based in audio? Well, it turns out that with a lot of determination and research you can - and hopefully you won’t confuse everyone on the way!

It’s no secret that I love to travel - and I also love to be organized! Making a packing list is great fun, until you forget something so in this episode of Automators David and I decided to find as many ways as we could to solve the problem of creating a packing list. Naturally our techniques overlapped in a few places, but we still came up with a variety of solutions - which you can use to solve other problems too.

In this episode of Automators David and I got a chance to dive behind the scenes of ScreencastsOnline and into the Terminal app (not at the same time) with J.F. Brissette. David and J.F. met years ago at Macworld!

In episode 30 of Automators David and I thought we’d share a few of our recent automations with you - as well as updating my TextExpander outputs to accommodate a switch in my email addresses I had some fun with Shortcuts!

In episode 29 of Automators we got to talk to Adam Tow - creator of awesome automations. I met Adam at the Automators WWDC meet up this year and he demoed some of his wonderful shortcuts for me. I’ve seen them before and even tried them out, but once I saw Adam demoing them David and I knew we had to get him on the show to share how this all works!

In Automators 27 David and I did the thing we do best: ignore all the advice, install the betas, suffer for it, but in the end we got you the goods on Shortcuts in iOS 13 and what it’s really like!

In the latest episode of Automators, David and I dived into our home automation setups and went beyond “I can control it from my phone” to find out what things you can really automate, because that’s the kind of automation nerds we are!

In episode 25 of Automators David and I sat down together in person, with the help of his suitcase and some shoes, we were able to record a full episode in person!

In episode 25 of Automators David and I sat down together in person, with the help of his suitcase and some shoes, we were able to record a full episode in person!

In the latest episode of Automators David and I went crazy over AirTable - we use it to plan Automators which makes our life so much easier, that combined with the automations you can attach to this meant it was the perfect topic for an episode of Automators!

As I’ve talked about on Automators before, I have used Zapier to send notifications to my iPhone which trigger Shortcuts - this means that I can have a series of automated actions happen and follow it up with something I need to manually do. I’ve been using PushBullet and Pushover to do this - I’ve tried both and they’re both good, but they’re designed for notifications and the URLs triggering automations is not something it was designed to do. Additionally PushBullet still hasn’t been updated for the iPhone X(s) screen format. Pushover has been updated more recently, but it still doesn’t quite match up with what Pushcut can do as a dedicated app.

I was really excited when Tim Nahumck agreed to come onto Automators to talk about Drafts! In the last year the app has increased in power so much, as well as gaining a Mac app, and now seemed like the perfect time to cover it.

In episode 21 of Automators, David and I were joined by the lovely Dr Drang! You may have heard him on a few other podcasts, including Mac Power Users.

As well as a meet up before WWDC in Orange County</a

, David and I are hosting a meetup at WWDC - Tuesday lunchtime to be specific! We don’t have the precise location nailed down yet (we’d like to meet outside) so make sure to keep an eye out for updates on this event! As well as David and myself, Alex Cox and Matthew Cassinelli of Supercomputer, and Simon Støvring developer of Scriptable will be there! If you’re around we’d love to meet you and say hello.

David and I are hosting a meet up in Orange County, California before we head up to WWDC - the exact date, time, and location are yet to be determined, but it will be on either Friday May 31st, or Saturday June 1st. We hope to see many people there!

In episode 20 of Automators we were joined by the wonderful Brett Terpstra, and dove deep into how he got started with automation. I was personally fascinated by the extra keyboards</a

and the Leap Motion he uses to control his Mac.

In episode 19 of Automators David and I dive into recent updates to Shortcuts.

On episode 18 of Automators David and I interviewed John Siracusa, web developer, Perl fan, and former reviewer of Mac OS X (as it was then) for Ars Technica. John was a wonderful guest on the show - we talked about what automation he does, and doesn’t do - as well as the how and the why! Like many of our listeners John is very much a Mac first user - I hope you enjoy the show!

Episode 17 of Automators comes to you live from PodCon!

Episode 17 of Automators comes to you live from PodCon!

In episode 16 of Automators we got to interview Myke Hurley, co-founder of Relay FM! Myke told us about how he uses automation - check out the episode to learn more!

Episode 15 of Automators has arrived - and with it our secrets for automating time tracking.

Episode 14 of Automators is all about journalling - when David suggested the topic for this episode I jumped on it. I subscribed to Day One last year and have been trying to improve my usage of it, this episode forced me to go figure out some automations to make it easier - thankfully since recording I’ve been journalling more consistently than ever!

In episode 13 of Automators we got to interview David Barnard from Contrast - the company behind Launch Center Pro which was just updated this week.

The world has gone wild for Shortcuts home screens - including David and myself! In episode 11 of Automators we have gone into why you might want to try this crazy fad and how we’re using it ourselves, so - let’s dive in!

Episode 10 of Automators is all about Zapier. David and I both recently dove into Zapier plans and thought it would be a great topic for an episode - after all, we use it to automate Automators!

Episode 9 of Automators is all about Scriptable, a great app released for iOS 12 which allows you to control your device with JavaScript. We were fortunate enough to have the developer of Scriptable, Simon B. Støvring come on the podcast to tell us about the app and some of the things it can do.

Episode 8 of automators is all about filing documents automatically. We we said in the episode, one of the keys to success is good naming and structure - and I made a screencast which shows you how you can use Keyboard Maestro to rename files in a specific format that we need for our project slides at work

• with incrementing numbers in the middle of the document name.

For episode 6 of Automators, we were very fortunate to have been joined by the wonderful Matthew Cassinelli. Matthew writes for The Sweet Setup and iMore, has also written for Tech Crunch, and is a Shortcuts genius - we went through two more complex Shortcuts in this episode to give you some ideas of your very own.

Episode 5 of Automators is all about project templates, and how they can help you to be more productive. David and I are both OmniFocus users, but project templates can be used with almost every task management system out there - even Reminders!

Episode 4 of automators is all about Shortcuts and Siri Shortcuts. We discussed what’s possible now, what we’re excited about (and not so excited).

In the third episode of Automators we are joined by Sal Soghoian, AppleScript God, to learn about AppleScript and how to use it!

In the third episode of Automators we are joined by Sal Soghoian, AppleScript God, to learn about AppleScript and how to use it!

Episode 2 of Automators is all about automating email. We all have email, and there are a lot of things you can do to automate it - from filters, to mail merges, and complete automation of sending emails.

This week’s episodes of The Automators is focused on calendar event creation. There are many ways you can automatically create calendar events, and it’s useful to be able to do so, to avoid losing information. You can also use calendar events as a trigger to do something - which we cover towards the end. Below there are details of all the automations we cover, including 4 (really, four!) screencasts.

This week’s episodes of The Automators is focused on calendar event creation. There are many ways you can automatically create calendar events, and it’s useful to be able to do so, to avoid losing information. You can also use calendar events as a trigger to do something - which we cover towards the end. Below there are details of all the automations we cover, including 4 (really, four!) screencasts.

I’ve been asked several times if I have a podcast of my own, or a podcast about automation, and today I’m very excited to announce both: I’m launching a podcast with David Sparks on Relay FM called Automators.