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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.

Back in June, I posted a completely un-serious post that described a ridiculous Rube Goldberg approach to grabbing two-factor authentication codes from your text messages on macOS using Keyboard Maestro (for those of use who don’t use Safari).

How dumb was it? Let’s just say that it relied on taking a screenshot of Notifcation Center and parsing the code out of the image.

A joke, yes, but also a fun distraction one evening.

To my surprise, very nice reader azorpheunt provided a real solution in the comment section earlier today.

When I tell people, “I started my app business in 2007”, that’s not true. I never meant to start a business – it just happened. Because if I had sat down one afternoon and thought, “I’m going to begin selling software online today,” I sure as hell wouldn’t have intentionally named my company Click On Tyler.

For fourteen years, I’ve hated that name.

I wish I could remember who on Twitter pointed out this Accessibility feature, but I wanted to highlight it here and how I use this gesture because it’s such a fun shortcut for automation nerds.

Watch this.

Situations like these are never easy on the person’s family – no matter the medical condition. But Alzheimer’s is particularly vile because at some point, the person living with this disease…disappears. And other than the occasional fleeting glimpse of their old selves, the person that family loved and now has to take care of, is gone. It’s fucking cruel to witness the story play out over the remaining years. In my grandmother’s case, it took eleven.

My grandmother passed away in August of 2019 at ninety-five years young. Why am I writing this post now? Two years later? Before I get to that, let me tell you about her.

The story I’m reminded of today is the one about the only actual Apple leak I ever personally heard.

It was one of those awkward moments in an otherwise mostly-quiet train car where one person will just. not. stop. talking. And this guy was going on and on about the electronics company he worked for and all the patents they had.

There aren’t enough adjectives in the world to describe her giant-sized personality. So I’ll just say happy number six to the strongest girl I know.

To me, that’s fascinating. The direct connection between a piece of aluminum strapped to your wrist and the emotions overwhelming your brain. A tenuous but verifiable link between digital and analog. An opportunity to recognize something tangible and make a change.

A few weeks ago I built a niche little app idea dubbed MeetingBuddy. You choose a target app from a pre-defined list (or pick any app on your Mac) and a time interval and MeetingBuddy starts screenshotting that app’s windows.

Each recording session goes into its own folder where all of the screenshots are organized by date. But! while this is all going on, MeetingBuddy is also OCR-ing any text found in the screenshots and storing that alongside each image in a sidecar file.

You end up with a folder of recordings for each session. Images and their corresponding text contents.

Why is this useful? Honestly, I’m not exactly sure that it is just yet. But here’s what I’ve been using it for.

The point of today’s post is that while I’ve been using Three Things myself for a year now, a very nice person was kind enough to email me last week and let me know that the version posted online had expired. My bad.

Here’s an updated build.

Also, this new version comes with an experimental new feature: iCalendar syncing!