Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/03/quit-wasting-time-on-repetitiv.html
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Just a comment to give another endorsement to Keyboard Maestro. I have over 30 repetitive multi-step tasks programmed using the app. It’s really great. What I love most is that you can be in any application and it can bring up any application. So, for instance, I can have an excel file, highlight a cell, copy the data to a clipboard, then bring up a new google chrome tab with a URL, and the excel cell data as a parameter.
You can also do things like run a shell command. So, for instance, you can call curl to an API, get data back, and then run a regex search on the results… then continue on to whatever else you need to do with the API data. In my case, I have a reference ID for a transaction, which I then call an API to get a list of more data based on the transaction ID. Then I parse through the returned data, and continue to a second API with the parsed out piece of data I needed to call the second API.
I know, the programmer in you is screaming out in agony at how backwards and inefficient this is and how stupid it sounds and well… it’s not for you. This tool, for me, is perfect because I don’t control the APIs, and there’s no time to campaign for the APIs to change, and Time’s A-Wasting while we wring out hands and complain about how much better this could be. So I just McGuyver the hell out of these situations and move on. I take what I can get and still managed to automate an otherwise time-consuming manual process.
In reality, there’s no way to quickly summarize how many tasks are possible with this program. It’s absolutely enormous. The number of ways you can trigger workflows expands the possibilities exponentially, too. You just need to put your thinking cap on, and once you figure out a workflow for one problem, more of your tasks start to look automatable.
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but my quasireligious orientation demands of me that i engage in repetitive, menial tasks to help me extinguish my ego and achieve enlightenment. this app must have been created by . . . SATAN!
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that’s what makes being a human so amazing.
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but my quasireligious orientation demands of me that i engage in repetitive, menial tasks to help me extinguish my ego and achieve enlightenment.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?
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actually i was thinking more about once, a couple of summers ago, when my nephew and i were helping clean out my mother’s barn and she insisted on micromanaging every detail of our tasks and my nephew started complaining but i stopped him and told him that my mother, his grandmother, was an eastern religion master who was instructing us in menial, repetitive tasks so as to extinguish our egos and help us achieve enlightenment. he laughed and got back to work while my mother eyed me with a look consisting of three parts irritation and two parts amusement.
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