Lock Screen "Launcher" Widget with Scriptable

iOS 16 introduced new lock screen widgets! Rather that installing various third party widdgets, I want to create my own using Scriptable. Here is a simple “universal” widget to launch an application or a Shortcut (bonus: or even the home screen too!) ...

2 Dec 2022

Script to re-map MacBook Pro function keys

In my last post, “Re-mapping physical function keys on MacBook Pros” I used the hidutil tool to re-map the function keys on a Mac without a touchbar. I’ve since created a script to more easily apply changes. ...

19 Jun 2022

Re-mapping physical function keys on MacBook Pros

One common ask from M1 (Apple Silicon / ARM) MacBook Pro users is to be able to re-define what the top row of physical function keys do, for example, to change the Dictation (F5) key to decrease the keyboard backlight brightness and DND (F6) to increase it, similar to other Macs. Here’s how to do that… and more! ...

15 Jun 2022

Shortcut to convert image format and paste - redux

I was not satisfied with my last macOS Shortcut to convert image format and paste. The simple version forced me to choose between PNG and JPEG, and the complex version was too slow - specifically, the Find All Windows action. So here we go again… ...

11 Feb 2022

My macOS Shortcut to Tile Windows

In the macOS Monterey Shortcuts Gallery, there are Shortcuts to “Tile Last 2 Windows”, “Tile Last 3 Windows” and “Tile Last 4 Windows”. This is my single combined version for any window (not just the last x). ...

19 Nov 2021

Shortcut to convert image format and paste

I have a hangup about Microsoft Office on macOS - it often elects to paste images from the clipboard in TIFF format, instead of PNG or JPG, which results in massive files, be it PowerPoint .PPTX presentations, Word .DOCX documents or Excel .XLSX spreadsheets. Enter: A new macOS Shortcut to convert clipboard images to (lossless) PNG or (lossy) JPG. ...

13 Nov 2021

Shortcuts on macOS: A review

This is an opinion piece on Shortcuts v5.0 (1144.2) for macOS Monterey v12.0.1. Readers of my blog know I use Automator, AppleScripts, and shell scripts to get stuff done. So I was curious to see if I could replace all these with just Shortcuts. TL;DR: no, no I can’t. ...

6 Nov 2021

Extract Text from a Screenshot with Shortcuts

Here is a macOS Shortcut to take a screenshot and extract text from it using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). I find this useful to copy text from e.g. a presentation or video during a virtual call, etc. ...

2 Nov 2021

Sending keystrokes to an application using Shortcuts for macOS Monterey

I’ve been trying out Shortcuts on macOS 12 Monterey! I have written about Shortcuts on iOS/iPadOS in the past, so was keen to migrate my automation scripts from Automator or osascript to Shortcuts. Here is the first one: A Shortcut plus global hotkey to an application, leveraging AppleScript/JXA. ...

29 Oct 2021

iOS Shortcut to Join Cisco WebEx

Here is a quick iOS Shortcut to join Cisco WebEx personal rooms by email name. In my organization, once logged in to Cisco WebEx, we can join a colleague’s personal meeting room just by his or her email name. Here is a shortcut to either: Launch WebEx for the contact from the Contacts App share sheet, Or just run the shortcut to select email to launch WebEx. ...

1 Nov 2020