Hello, I'm Evan. I write about tech from my perspective – that of the average tech geek, sometimes with my lawyer glasses on. You can also find me on Twitter and at my real-life job as a lawyer. MORE ABOUT ME.
Bryan Villarin writing for All Narfed Up:
When viewing a list on all platforms (Mac, iPad, or iPhone), you can filter by more than one tag.
Hit the link for details on how to filter on macOS and iOS. Things 3 is beautiful and can be simple, but there’s power for those willing to look for it. iOS itself is similar – it is simple for those who want an easy experience, with power features optional and out of sight unless you want them.
My foray into micro.blog is a work in progress. Micro.blog is a service that allows you to publish Twitter-like updates to your own site, but also have them appear in a familiar timeline interface at micro.blog. The idea is that you can own your content.
Since first going live with micro.blog, all my micro.blog posts have resided on the front page of 40Tech and in the main RSS feed, as well as at micro.blog. To help those who didn’t want to see those posts in their feed, I set up a feed to let you exclude those posts.
It’s time for some more tweaking. I realized I was refraining from posting to micro.blog because I didn’t want more trivial items to show up on the main page at 40Tech and in the main RSS feed. To remove that friction, I’ve removed the micro.blog posts from the home page at 40Tech, and from the RSS feed. You can still see all the micro.blog costs in their own section of the site. They also have their own RSS feed. Those who want to get all the content from 40Tech should subscribe to both the main feed and the micro.blog feed. If you’re on micro.blog, you can also follow me there. Of course, you can still follow me on Twitter.
I have set up my firm’s case management system to email me three reports every Sunday evening. These reports arrive as attachments to email. For several months, I’ve been coming in on Monday morning and dragging those reports out of Mail and into Unclutter, which I keep in my Mac menu bar so I have easy access to certain files. I recently decided I would automate this process.
Looking around online, I found several AppleScripts purporting to accomplish this, but I wanted to see if I could accomplish this with Keyboard Maestro. I ended up doing it with Keyboard Maestro and Automator.
My Automator workflow, as depicted below, is pretty simple. It finds any email in my inbox that meets two conditions:
If those conditions are met, Automator gets the attachments from those messages and saves those attachments into the same Dropbox folder used by Unclutter to hold files. (I don’t know if I actually need the second step in the workflow).
Then it was simply a matter of setting up a Keyboard Maestro macro that would launch the Automator workflow every Monday before I arrived at the office.
The final step for me was to create a rule in Hazel to monitor Unclutter, and clean out old reports every week.
Caveat: I just set up this system yesterday, and forced it to run out of its normal schedule. It worked fine. I’ll see this Sunday evening whether it runs on the schedule I designated.
Here are links to the Automator workflow and Keyboard Maestro macro:
Things 3.4 has just hit the store with three fantastic new features: Linking to Things, Powerful Automation, and Handover from other apps – all made possible by our brand new Things URLs.
Wow. From hooking Things into Drafts, Workflow, Launcher, Mindnode, and more, the possibilities of this are exciting. Things used to be the app that was beautiful, but not as powerful as OmniFocus. Now . . . we’ll have to see after everyone has played with these new features for a while. I’ve been working on a video on using Things and DEVONthink together. This might require me to rework a few things.
