In this episode of Automators, Rosemary and I are joined by the magical Merlin Mann to talk about his automation journey and problems. From The Simpsons to Synology and Shortcuts, there’s plenty to hear about.
Do you have a MacBook with a Touch Bar that you are ignoring? You could fix that today with this week’s sponsor, BetterTouchTool. My Touch Bar gives me the current date and time, the current temperature (and daily high and low), and a list of my upcoming appointments. I like to think of it as my “Informational Touch Bar” and it was easy to set up with BetterTouchTool. Here’s a picture of my Touch Bar.
The Informational Touch Bar – Click to enlarge.
The Time
I know you can also display the time and date in the menu bar, but I often work in full screen when I’m on a laptop so putting it in the Touch Bar is useful.
The Time Widget is customizable. You can set your own formatting using the Unicode standard. Here is the code I’m using for the pictured setup.
E MMM d H:mm
The time widget setup – Click to enlarge.
The Temperature
This widget is seasonal for me. Once it gets warm, I don’t need to know the exact temperature, but it helps me out during colder periods. My setup is a little odd because I put the current temperature but also the high-low in parenthesis. I don’t bother with the Fahrenheit designation on the high-low to save space. Here is the BTT code for my temperature widget.
This is my favorite BTT widget. I block nearly all of my time through the day and having a display on my Touch Bar (it scrolls!) comes in super handy when I am not sure where I’m going/doing next. Here is my syntax for this display:
It takes almost no time to set simple widgets like this up with BetterTouchTool and dramatically increase your Touch Bar’s value. BetterTouchTool can also do a lot more with your mouse, touchpad, and just about any other Mac input device you can throw at it. To learn more, head over to the BetterTouchTool website. My thanks to BetterTouchTool for sponsoring MacSparky and helping me get more out of the Touch Bar.
I’ve heard from a lot of listeners/readers about the new Craft app and I’ve spent the last few days taking a closer look at it. Craft is one of the growing crop of intelligent notes/thinking apps. It has the ability to make notes both atomic-sized and large. Craft also uses a block text formatting making it easy to move individual blocks around (or even group them). Craft is a competitor in my life with Obsidian. Although the apps are very different.
Obsidian is just text. Craft can hold multi-media.
Obsidian is just a group of markdown files and entirely in my control. Craft is a closed system (with an export feature) where you must use Craft’s sync back end. (Although Craft has many export features.)
Obsidian gives you 100% control over your markdown files and their security. Craft data is stored on Craft servers and not end-to-end encrypted.
Craft is a native app. It has the beautiful look of a native app and it runs like a native app. Craft has many additional features that I doubt will ever go to Obsidian. Obsidian is not a native Mac app but instead an electron app. It doesn’t have a lot of the usual Mac niceties and it uses more RAM than a native app would. (That said, Obsidian is the nicest electron app I’ve ever used.)
Craft runs on Mac, iPad, and iPhone and your data is available easily on all platforms. Obsidian is a Mac-only app. You can access via iPad using third-party apps, but it is pretty rough.
Craft displays in rich text by default while at the same time supporting markdown. Obsidian works in a markdown (but can display rendered rich text easily enough.)
Obsidian has a friendly and passionate collection of users and developers behind it. Having spent just a few days in the Craft Slack channel, it appears Craft does too.
My takeaway is that both of these apps are very capable and on the right track. There are real differences between these apps and a good case could be made for either of them. I can see Craft’s appeal, particularly when I want to access and modify data on iPhone or iPad. Another Craft benefit for me would be the ability to embed images without having to link out to an external file. That said, I think Craft’s lack of end-to-end encryption is probably a deal-breaker for me. I say that now, but this is all very much a moving target right now with both apps iterating nearly daily. Fun times for us nerds.
Congratulations to Fantastical for earning the “Mac App of the Year” award from Apple. I pay a lot for app subscriptions. Sometimes I feel like I’m getting ripped off but not with Fantastical. In the year since they’ve gone to the subscription model, they’ve continued to keep the gas down on improvement and new features and this honor from Apple is well-earned.
I’ve written before about my biggest gripe with Big Sur being the unnecessary cuteness of hiding the proxy icon and requiring a delayed mouse hover to get it back. Holding down the shift key makes the proxy icon appear immediately when you hover near, which is an improvement. Herman van Boejen (via Brett Terpstra) has figured a way to remove that initial delay so the icon animates in as soon as you get near the document name. Here it is:
Lately, I see the term “Zettelkasten” show up everywhere as this explosion of research and personal knowledge management applications is taking shape. The term is more nebulous than you’d think. Here is the best description of the canonical Zettelkasten method that I’ve read. While I’m not a purist (my system is much more informal), I was able to make several tweaks to my system after reading this
Stephen Hacket has beenupping his game on his Touch Barusing BetterTouchTool along with Keyboard Maestro to run setups on his laptop. This all grew out of a similar workflow he’s been using on his Mac Pro following some gentle encouragement from me that he buy a Stream Deck.
The Touch Bar is something a lot of folks love to hate but I don’t see it that way. I think Apple’s biggest mistake with the Touch Bar is shipping it with the Siri button right over the top of the delete button. As a result, it’s easily triggered and this makes people hate the Touch Bar. The good news is that you can customize it (and even remove the Siri button). I also use BetterTouchTool with my Touch Bar but rather than triggering Keyboard Maestro snippets, I’ve been using it to display information, like the date, weather, and upcoming calendar events. I’ll do a separate post in the future outlining my tweaks but in the meantime, if you have a Mac with a Touch Bar, you’ll want to check out BetterTouchTool for making the Touch Bar work for you.
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I don’t often run sales on the MacSparky Field Guides. Instead, I price the courses so, in my opinion at least, they are always good values. Nevertheless, I decided this year to make an exception. Through this weekend only, all of the MacSparky Field Guides are $10 off. That’s the biggest discount I’ve ever offered. So if you’d like to get better at something nerdy on your Mac or iPhone, now’s the time to jump on board. To get the discount, just scroll to the bottom of any course (or press the enroll button at the top) and select the Black Friday discount price before check out.
