Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Apple Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, March 8, 2020, and this is show number 774.
CCATP #628 — Bart Busschots on Creating Automator Quick Actions
This week’s Chit Chat Across the Pond is a bit unusual. As I’ll tell you in the intro, it isn’t really an episode of Programming By Stealth and it’s not quite light enough for a Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite. As Bart described it, it’s “PBS Adjacent”. But before that scares you away if you’re not a programmer, let me explain why you’ll still get something out of it.
In this episode, Bart explains how he built a series of Services to help him manipulate text. Services are created using Automator, and they are accessed via the menu of any application that supports the particular Service you create. Apple has unhelpfully renamed the way you create Services as Quick Actions inside Automator.
In this episode Bart explains how he used JavaScript to create Quick Actions to change selected text to lower, upper, or title case and even plain text. He’s got ones that count characters, lines or words. You know how annoying it is when you copy some text and it’s got leading or trailing spaces, and then it doesn’t work properly when you paste, say something like a phone number into a web form? He’s even got one that will trim that annoying white space off of the clipboard.
But I said I would make sure you’re not scared off if you’re not a JavaScript programmer. Bart very helpfully made all of his Quick Action/Services available for download so you can install them on your Mac and use them without any programming at all.
It was a fun episode and we both enjoyed ourselves immensely. For once we didn’t strictly stay on task either and chatted a bit because we were having such a good, relaxed time.
Since this episode didn’t fit in Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite or Programming By Stealth, I decided to put it in both! Look for it in your podcatcher of choice, or you can listen right over at podfeet.com episode CCATP #628. Bart’s written tutorial is available at bartb.ie where you can also find the download link for his Quick Actions.
Blog Posts
CES 2020: LINEDOCK Dock for MacBook Pro
CES 2020: North American Lighting Adaptive Headlights
When the Live Show Goes Wrong
CES 2020: NightWatch Epileptic Seizure Detection System
CES 2020: SpotOn Wireless Smart Fence for Dogs
Support the Show
I realized that it’s been quite some time since I was a new patron of a podcast, and I was curious whether they’d changed the interface to make it any easier to figure out how to support the Podfeet Podcasts through Patreon. In the old days it was sort of difficult to figure out because I publish the NosillaCast weekly and so charge weekly but that would mean the minimum you could contribute was a dollar a week. But what if that’s too rich for your blood?
I’m happy to say that they’ve modified the interface a lot so it’s much clearer and easier to modify to your own budget. By default you see a window that says “Choose what you pay” and it’s set to $5. Below that it has a radio button where you can choose to support every creation (the default) or you can set a monthly limit. If you change nothing, you would be supporting the Podfeet Podcasts at $20 per month. While that would be awesome for me, you can modify this. If you change the radio button to set a monthly limit, you can go as low as $1 and you can even choose how many times per month you’d like to be charged. The funny thing is you can change it to $1/month if you like, but you can also go up to 99 times per month. I bet that’s a bug in the interface but I thought it was funny.
Anyway I thought that was cool. Patreon lets you have complete and granular control of how much you want to pledge to support the work we do here at the Podfeet Podcasts. So go check it out at podfeet.com/patreon.
Security Bits with Bart Busschots
That’s going to wind this up for this week. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter @podfeet. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com/. podfeet.com/patreon, podfeet.com/paypal, podfeet.com/facebook, podfeet.com/slack! And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.