The only thing Keyboard Maestro doesn’t do is decide what action to take – which is just as well really, for a variety of reasons! Marking the issue Resolved or On Hold as appropriate.Adding whatever notes needed to track the action taken in a specific field.Pasting the URLs in the correct quoted format at the top of the reply, along with the appropriate response.Extracting all of the URLs from the messages, and opening them in new windows.However, with Keyboard Maestro, I can reduce this all to a couple of key presses, with a couple of macros doing all of the following: Sometimes the URLs are jumbled up and I need to fix them before opening or responding, or they are buried in huge blocks of text… etc. Select a certain option to mark the issue as ‘Resolved’ or ‘On Hold’.Īll of these steps are fairly straightforward, but a lot of time is taken up by clicking through the same tasks for each – even when I use a textexpander or snippet manager like Alfred.Reply by copying a specific part of the original message, and quoting it back in a certain format before providing an appropriate response.Note down the action taken in certain circumstances.Find the website URL in the e-mail and open it.The possibilities are endless.Īs part of my job, I regularly have to review and respond to reports about different websites using a helpdesk system. Need to extract URLs from a big block of text? Macro. Do you need to convert HTML to markdown? Use a macro. Do you have to fill out specific fields on a website more than once? Use a macro. Once you do sit down and give it some attention though, you’ll soon come up with plenty. It takes a conscious effort to work out what tasks you could automate – which isn’t necessarily something you thought was possible beforehand. One of the biggest hurdles to starting off with Keyboard Maestro is working out exactly what you’ll use it for. In addition to the automation, there is a whole host of other cool features that you can do a deep dive into – such as an extensive multi clipboard manager, application switcher, and others – but for me the real glory lies in the macros. Keyboard Maestro is there to help you automate pretty much any task that you can think of. ![]() However, that isn’t the point of Keyboard Maestro. If you want to carry out simple, general tasks, then there may well be a nicer app that lets you do those things. The UI is not the most intuitive, and you’d be forgiven for giving up at the beginning purely on that basis alone. The sheer power of Keyboard Maestro is also its undoing in a way. It’s easy to look at the list of actions and wonder when you will ever use any of them. You get a lot of control from the get go. Whether that’s telling the mouse to move and click on a certain point, displaying a popup message, getting an image size, filling in a field on a website, or whatever. The key difference is that instead of having to write Applescript for every action you want to complete (which is still an option, by the way), there are a whole bunch of options baked in. If you’re familiar with Alfred, think of Alfred workflows, but on steroids. Essentially, Keyboard Maestro allows you to take any task that you have to repeat, and automates it. This is a good question, as it isn’t immediately obvious. Okay okay so Keyboard Maestro is great, but what does it actually do?. I’ve gone through that cycle a number of times, and after rediscovering just how awesome it is, I decided to finally complete this post. Secondly, it’s an app that you tend to set up and forget… before rediscovering it later on when your needs have changed, and you realise: “Oh! Keyboard Maestro could make this way easier!”. Instead, it’s an app that’s best for repetitive tasks that are very specific to each user’s needs, which makes it difficult to give good examples. Firstly, there aren’t so many general use cases for Keyboard Maestro – at least not for me. So if Keyboard Maestro is so great, why did it take me so long to publish this? Well, there’s a few reasons. I honestly don’t know what I would do without it at this point. However, after months years of sustained use, my feelings towards Keyboard Maestro have completely changed. The learning curve is steep, and the documentation pretty unclear – especially when compared to the other productivity apps that are available. I have to admit to being wary when I first tried it out. I’ve had this article on the back burner for almost three years now, but for the next thrilling instalment of my productivity app blogs, I’ll be turning to look at Keyboard Maestro.ĭon’t let the somewhat dated website put you off, the app itself is unbelievably powerful.
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