mostly nonsense
As much as it is a job and source of income, for me, building software is also a way to relax, a form of self-expression, play, and in the best moments – joy.
Today, I want to show off a project so far along the joy side of that spectrum that it blows past being silly and borders on pure ridiculousness.
Let’s reskin Notification Center on macOS.
And make it look like Winamp.
I’ve been big into journaling for close to a decade now – at least in my personal life. But I’ve never been able to build up the same habit in my work / professional life – even though I know I would reap benefits there, too.
I’ve tried all sorts of workflows to make journaling my workday a regular and frictionless routine — everything from a Day One hotkey to some convoluted Keyboard Meastro macros and Drafts.app actions.
None of them stuck.
But what finally did work for me (at least for the last six months or so) is a tiny little Mac app called Capture Thing.
I do know that fourteen years into iOS, people still ducking hate autocorrect. Especially when you find your ducking text messages littered with ducks. There’s just no ducking way around it. Short of adding a fake contact to your address book named Dr. Duck Ducking McDucker, autocorrect seems ducking incapable of learning everyone’s favorite bit of profanity.
That got me thinking earlier today. What’s going to happen when Apple finally leads us into that next frontier of human / computer interaction? What happens when our day-to-day reality becomes augmented with live information and our physical and digital worlds merge even closer together?
What happens if Apple takes autocorrect’s prudish vocabulary into AR? If they dared to try and censor the real world, how would that look?
Stick with me, folks. This is going to get super nerdy and may take a while to explain. It’s also going to cover some of my favorite topics: a custom-built Mac app, a small server-side script, Keyboard Maestro, the command line, and URL schemes.
Let’s talk about the stuff you need to do and the files, supporting documents, and reference material you need to accomplish those tasks.
Let’s be honest. I’m an idiot. If it weren’t for technology holding my hand and functioning as a second brain, I wouldn’t be able to make it through this modern world.
That’s why I trust software to remember all the things I would otherwise forget.
And with the number of meetings I’m in now, it really helps if my calendar is front and center.
So, another week, another app. This time it’s a small little open-source calendar for your macOS Desktop I call Calendar Hero. I made it last week after I was late to a meeting because, well, I was vacuuming and not thinking about the day ahead.
I used another Mac app to do this, but it stopped working for me sometime during Catalina in 2019. I missed what it did, so I reimplemented a simple version of it last week.
This is Calendar Hero.
Standup.app is a tiny little Mac app that I made last week because I needed it in my day job. I’m not sure what to do with it or what will ultimately become of it, but, as usual, I figured I should make the app available in case anyone else finds it useful.
It helps facilitate the super-short standup call I run with my team every morning.
It also serves double-duty as a weird, helpful presentation utility for the seemingly never-ending stream of video meetings I have throughout the day.
I know there are other solutions out there, but this one is mine and built to my odd specifications.
I occassioanlly need to scan a folder and all of its subdirectories to see if any of them DO NOT contain files of a certain type.
I’m fully aware you can do this with some combination of shell commands, but I always spent 20 minutes googling for how to do it again every time I needed to. It was faster just to write this small utility myself.
I call it dnc, which stands for “does not contain”. You can download the source or a pre-built binary on GitHub. The builds aren’t notarized. So be sure to ask Apple if it’s OK to run this on your Mac.
Read the full post for an example of why I need this script.
After my post last week about the updates I made to my audio app Ears, longtime internet buddy @macrael asked:
@tylerhall Do you use libraries for the hotkey-setting UI or the start-on-launch stuff? I’m putting together my first Mac app and am looking into those parts rn.
I do, actually. In addition to replying to MacRae on the nightmare birdsite, I thought I’d post the two helper projects here for anyone else searching.
Eighteen hours later, I’m here to write about the dumb, little toy of an app I made this morning just for Big Sur. I honestly don’t expect other people to use it. I’m not even sure if I’ll keep using it. It was more of a “I hate this. I wonder if I can fix it?” type of thing.
I’ve written previously about using Hazel on macOS to react to a new file appearing in a synced iCloud Drive folder and running commands. But I wanted a faster solution that I could trigger from almost anywhere – including an iOS Shortcut. A way to send a command directly from my phone (or maybe any other device?) to my Mac.
What I came up with is a tiny, macOS menu bar app I call Shelley – because as a friend told me, it’s a Frankenstein of a hack.