Transcript
So I’m a huge fan of David Sparks and his mini podcast. I was recently listening to the automators podcast where they were talking about the pros and cons of using different automation tools such as Apple Shortcuts which is easy to use, and Keyboard Maestro which is extremely powerful but also a lot more difficult to use. I think there’s is actually a third option here that I want to throw in. But first let me give you some context for what they were talking about.
It is there. I really feel like they’re both playing to their strengths. Like shortcuts for people who haven’t done a lot of automation, who don’t own Keyboard Maestro, shortcuts does a lot of great stuff and they’re easy to build and they’re consistent. Whereas Keyboard Maestro is kind of in case of fire, break last thing where it can do anything. I mean, like I still am amazed like that because I have a grammarly script I run and grammarly works much better on the Internet than it does in the app. But there is no way to open a new document, granted short of clicking a specific icon on the screen and it just amazes me. Every time I run that script and it opens, the website waits a few seconds and then clicks the button for me and then paste the text in the new document. I mean, it’s like that is so amazing that you can do that. Take a screenshot and just tell the computer to click the middle of that screenshot, right? I mean, find it on the screen no matter where it is and push the button. It’s like that is automation, baby.
That is automation right there.
All right, I totally agree with David here. That is automation. That is the type of friction that seems small but when you do it a dozen times per day really can grade at you. So I’m going to give you an option here. If you feel like Keyboard Maestro might be a little bit above your pay grade, there’s an option that comes with set app. If you’re already a setup subscriber, that means you don’t have to pay for anything. In addition, if you’re not a setup subscriber, you should strongly consider Subscribing because it is a great subscription service. The tool is called keysmith and let me show you how it works. So this is the keysmith UI. Very bare bones. It works with something called Macros. Those are essentially the tasks you want keysmith to perform for you. So let me go ahead and create a new one here. In fact, I’ve already gotten untitled one. If I wanted a new one, I would simply click right here where it says New Macro. Let me go ahead and title this. We’ll just do exactly what David did and call it Open Grammarly. All right, great. Now I’m going to record the task.
I’m simply going to press the record button and then I’m going to do what I want it to do. So I’m going to open up Safari and then I’m going to press Command L to go to the URL bar and I’ll type in Grammarly. Alright? From here I want to click on New. Now this is a little bit of a tip from experience. Any time you have two buttons right next to each other, as we do here, with New on top and upload on the bottom, make sure you click kind of at the top of the button here. I never get any misclicks, but we’ll test this out to make sure it works. Just clicking on the top of the button gives you a little bit more peace of mind. So I’ll click right here and that opens up a brand new grammarly document. And then I can simply paste in whatever contents of the clipboard that I have. I’m actually not going to do that right now, but I’ll show you how that works in a second. All right, so here we are, done. I’m going to go ahead and stop my recording. And now this is the list of tasks that keysmith is going to be running for me.
They’re going to open up Safari, press Command L to go to that URL bar, type grammarly, so on and so forth. Now, you can see here, I didn’t actually type grammarly all the way out because my autocomplete took over. So I can actually edit that right. I can click right here. And I just want to make sure that no matter what, grammarly.com gets typed all the way. Now, if I made other mistakes, let’s say I clicked somewhere I shouldn’t have, I could very easily remove a task. So let’s say I didn’t want this command L. I could go over to More and then delete that task and further, I can add tasks. So at the end here, I want to go ahead and paste the contents of the clipboard. I’m going to click on more click add action below and I’m going to do press key command V. Alright? Great. I just added pasting in the clipboard contents to my task. All right, great. So let’s go ahead and test this out. I’m just going to make a new tab here. Let’s go to Google.com and I’m going to move this all the way to the other side of my browser window and we’ll shrink it down here just to make sure that we’re really making sure keysmith can grab the button no matter where it is on the screen.
All right, let’s go ahead and test this out by clicking Run. All right, there we go. It worked perfectly. The only thing that didn’t happen was the similar content didn’t get pasted. So what I’m going to do here is edd a delay. So before I press Command V, I’m going to go to More and do Add an Action above and we’ll just say wait for, let’s say zero 5 seconds. All right, there we go. We’ll go back to Google and run this thing one more time. There we go. Everything worked perfectly that time. So that little delay, just make sure the page loads before it goes ahead and paste the contents of the clipboard. Alright, so at this point, we’re all set. We’ve got a script. It’s working. It was super easy. I didn’t have to code anything. Now, how do I actually use it in real life? Because I’m probably not going to want to come back to the keysmith window every time I do this. Otherwise, why not just open up Grammarly? Well, we’ve got a few options. keysmith is built around hockeys or key commands. So if you want to remember a bunch of key commands, this is a great way to do it.
But there are other options as well. So I could set a hotkey here, just go ahead and I’m going to do Control option command G. And now anytime I want Grammarly to open, I can just press that on my keyboard. We’ll do that right now. And there we go. But for me, I don’t like to use keyboard shortcuts for this type of thing for two reasons. One, I’m not going to remember them, and two, I end up pre populating a keyboard command in one application with a shortcut for another one. So I get some conflicts there. So for me, the best way to do this is to use shortcuts. And here is how we change a keysmith macro into a shortcut. You’re gonna go over here and click on more and then copy the macro URL. From here, create a brand new shortcut. I’m going to give a name like Open Grammarly. Then I need to open a URL. So I’m going to search for that in the righthand sidebar, I’ll drag it over into my shortcut, paste in that URL and hit return and we are done. Now it is going to ask for permission the first time I run it to test it out, right?
Is this okay? All right, I will allow that. And you can see here it is running Oops. I actually clicked inside of Safari while I was going and it’s still performed flawlessly. So you can see everything’s working great here. I can go ahead and save this as an application. Run it from my stream deck. All the things you can do with shortcuts, very, very simple. If you’re not familiar with how to do that. I think the best way is just right click add to the dock. Now it’s in my dock down here. I can use it as a regular application and then I can launch it from Stream Deck just using the regular launch key command inside of Stream Deck. So that is awesome. I think it is a great alternative to people who are skeptical about programming. Very complex. And you might already have access to this tool for fleeq. So check out all the links on the description. If you have any questions, let me know as well. If you’ve enjoyed this video, consider subscribing and I will see you in the next one.
