Transcript

Hey I'm Luke and this is How I Automate my job well, some of it anyway, using AppleScript In this video I'm going to show you two examples of how I automate my job using AppleScript coding with AppleScript can be quite complex, but fortunately automating the mouse and keyboard is very easy. That is after all how us humans use the computer. One quick thing, I made it an e-guide with all of the steps in this video so if you'd like to follow along with written instructions you can download that. There are a couple of helper tools that I use to simplify the AppleScripting workflow The first is Typinator which is a text expansion program that allows us to code with keywords instead of having to write out the entire code. The next is SizeUp which is a window management program. Whenever we are doing clicks with AppleScript it's important that the clicks always land in the same place and SizeUp will help move the window into the proper position. Next is cliclick or command line interface click AppleScript doesn't do a good job by default when clicking on things and this will help with that Finally is Alfred App, it's an application launcher and one of my most favorite programs. This will help us run AppleScripts a little bit easier. Let's get started Go ahead and open up your browser, I'm going to use Google Chrome and go to prodshop.co/automate-with-applescript This will download some helper scripts that I've created to click on things and also write new AppleScripts along with the text expansion shortcuts that I've created for you. Go to your downloads folder and go ahead and open up the zip And you can see the scripts and text expansion shortcuts there. Let's start by installing Typinator So just Google Typinator and it will be the first thing that pops up The trial version is fine. If you end up liking text expansion I definitely recommend getting this program. I've also included for Text Expander if that's your preferred text expansion program. Once Typinator is downloaded and installed, and open go ahead and just open up the lukes-applescript-shortcuts file in the package you downloaded and it will automatically import. I'll go ahead and delete it so that way I don't have two copies. Next, let's download SizeUp Google SizeUp and it will be by Irradiated Software. Once you have it downloaded and installed, go ahead and open it and you'll see the SizeUp icon which looks like a little window with four arrows around it Go to preferences and then go to the General tab, and make sure that the Show Visual Action Overlay is deselected By default, SizeUp will show an overlay every time that it's activated so I recommend disabling it. Let's go ahead and install cliclick. But to do that we're going to need to install Homebrew which is a package manager. If you don't know what that is, don't worry. Go to brew.sh Triple click on the line below install Homebrew Open up Terminal, command space, Terminal, enter. If you're using Spotlight that's fine. Paste the line of code, push enter, and it's going to ask you for your administrator password. The cursor won't move when your typing but it is working. It's going to take a minute or two to install and once it is installed go ahead and do command Q to quit Terminal and then open up Terminal again. For some reason it needs a refresh after installing brew. Once you have that installed type in brew install cliclick push enter, and it will do its' magic. Once cliclick is done installing Let's go to System Preferences because we need to grant some security privileges to the applications that we're gonna use. To do that, go to the apple at the top left click on System Preferences Go to the Security and Privacy tab Go to the Privacy tab, the last option Go down to Accessibility Click on the lock Enter your administrator password. Click on the plus sign. And then we are going to add a couple applications. It's easiest just to search for them. Type in Typinator. And do open. We'll do Terminal so we can do a test. SizeUp and then Script Editor. Once that's done you can close System Preferences, command Q. And let's go ahead and run a test with cliclick in Terminal. Type cliclick c: (which stands for click), zero comma zero. And then as we push enter it's going to click on the xy coordinate zero zero. Boom. Pretty cool huh? The next step is to setup Alfred. You can go ahead and go to alfredapp.com. Download the free trial which will be fine for the purposes of these examples. And once Alfred is open, go ahead and go to the menu bar at the top, click on the hat icon, and click on Preferences Go to the general tab. And I like to change the default keyboard shortcut to be command space. Alfred does the same thing Spotlight does but it's much more powerful. So I'll show you how to change the shortcut. Go to System Preferences. Command space System Preferences, enter. Go to the keyboard panel. Shortcuts Spotlight and make sure that the two selections there are deselected Once that's done, you can do command Q to quit System Preferences click in the Alfred Hotkey field, and do command space to change the keyboard shortcut. Next go to Features and then in the extras area make sure that AppleScripts is selected. Once that's done you can close Alfred Preferences. So let's start to make our first AppleScript What we'll do is we'll save out a Google Slides presentation as a PDF and then we'll create a loop to multiple Google Slides presentations Once time my manager asked me to save over 50 Google Slides presentations and after doing a couple I created this microautomation to make it much easier. Go to Google Chrome and type in slides.new That's the Google shortcut url for new Google Slides presentations. I'm going to go ahead and to command T to open a new tab and do that five times or, four more additional times Once you have them all open, let's go to the first one and we'll review the steps that we're gonna do. We'll click on File, Download As, PDF Document then we'll use the keyboard shortcut to go to the next tab which is option command right key If you're ever looking for a keyboard shortcut in a program you can do shift command question mark and then start typing what you want inside of the search within the Help menu and you can see if the keyboard shortcut you need is there Otherwise a quick Google search will do it. Go back to the first presentation and let's use the helper script that you downloaded to create a new AppleScript so once Alfred is open and ready to command space new applescript se SE stands for script editor push enter A dialog window will open asking what the file name should be I like to always preface it with the name of the program that I'm using so chrome dot, and then a description slides as pdf push enter and script editor will open our script with the proper code that we need. Go ahead and do shift command S, remove the word copy push enter and then replace, and then you'll be good to go Going forward you can do just command S The first step will be to click on file but before we click on anything let's make sure that the window is perfectly centered that way the clicks will land in the same spot each time Go to SizeUp and with Google Chrome selected you can do option command control C or you can use the selection inside of the menu There we go. Now that it's centered Hover your mouse over the word file and then launch Alfred without moving the mouse, command space and type in mousecode push enter a dialog window will come up asking for a coordinate marker name This is just a variable to keep track of each click So I'll just call this one "first" What you should see is Script Editor activate and the code that we need be pasted inside of the window. Go ahead and do command S to save and let's go for our second click I'll go back to Google Chrome, using command tab to kick over I'll do File hover over Download As command space to launch Alfred I'll type mousecode again push enter I'll type the coordinate marker as "second" and then the code for the second script will appear in Script Editor one more time File, Download As, and I'll hover over PDF document command space, mousecode, enter "Third" There we go. Now the next thing we need to do is tell the script "Hey, I want Google Chrome to show up before we click in these areas" If you would run the script as is, it will just click on whatever program is in the front So go to line right below "start coding below" and we're going to activate Google Chrome The full code is tell application "Google Chrome" to activate but the text expansion shortcut that I created just takes the word "tell" plus the first letter of the word application, making the shortcut tella. So type, t e l l a, and then a dialog box will appear asking which program do you want to activate Type Google Chrome then push enter next we want to make sure that the window is centered the text expansion shortcut for this is centerwindow Awesome. Now we can test it out Go ahead and do command R to run the script Awesome If it didn't work, go back to Script Editor, go to the very top of the script and change the delayOne variable to .4 Now the reason that there's a delay in between each step is if you send a bunch of AppleScript commands to the computer it's kind of like pushing a bunch of keys on a typewriter, it's gonna get stuck. So, coding it as a variable, and then putting it after each step will help AppleScript to do its' thing. And if you want to increase the delays you can just change it at the top line and you'll be good to go rather than having to change it throughout the code. The next step will be to perform the keyboard shortcut to go to the next tab which will be option command right key Now a little bit about typing with AppleScript there are two methods, there's keystroke which allows you to type letters, numbers and punctuation. And then there's key code, which will allow you to push page up, page down, down, left, right, things like that. In order to look up the key codes I've programmed a text expansion shortcut called keycodes So go ahead and launch Alfred and type keycodes, push enter and you can see a nice diagram that you can reference the key codes that you need. So right key is 124 but to make things easier I have other text expansion shortcuts for commonly used keys, and we'll go through those now. So go back to Script Editor but before we push a key with AppleScript we need to activate the System Events application Basically saying, "Hey, we're going to use the keyboard." So to do that, just type s y s e. The cursor should move automatically inside of the clause. And once it's there, go ahead and type rightkey all one word Perfect, the code we need is there Now we need to add the modifier keys to the right key So after 124, type using and since we're using multiple modifier keys we'll need a curly bracket, so open curly bracket, command down, option down. So it's just saying push the right key, with command down and option down at the same time. Let's go to our first presentation in Google Chrome go back to Script Editor and do command R to run it. And we should see a PDF download and then it jump to the next tab. Boom, boom, boom. Yep it made it to the second tab, you can see here. Awesome. The last step is to put it in a loop. So basically we'll have a dialog appear and say how many times do you want to do this, and then we'll execute the code. Let's go back to Script Editor, I'm going to maximize the window a bit, option command C, or control option command C, the three to the left of the space bar. Select everything below the phrase start coding below, do command X, HA! And then type loop setup. The cursor should move below the line repeat numberOfTimes times and do command V, command S to save, and it should compile correctly. Now here's what's going on in the code. There's going to be a question, how many times? And then, that number is going to be saved as a variable, numberOfTimes. Then this code, will repeat numberOfTimes times. Let's try it out. Let's go to Google Chrome, make sure that the first presentation is selected. We'll go back to Script Editor and do command R A dialog will pop up, I'll push 5 Boom. Yes, 2. Boom, boom boom. Yes, yes, yes. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Kewl, Kewl, Kewl. Pretty cool huh? So if you had 50 of these to do, you would save a lot of time. The next example we're going to do is to take a full page screenshot in Google Chrome. Let's get to it. First let's review the steps. We'll do shift command C to open the Inspect Element panel. Then we'll do shift command P to open the command menu. We'll type capture full. Then we'll push enter. Then once it's done we'll have a conditional statement that'll say, has this downloaded yet? And then click on the X to close the Inspect Element panel. Let's get started on the script. So command space, new applescript se. I'll call it chrome.screenshot push enter I'll do shift command S, take out copy, replace it, now we're good to go. So the first step will actually be to activate Google Chrome so, tella, Google Chrome next we will say, "Hey, we need the keyboard" because we're gonna do shift command C. So s y s e, put the cursor inside of the clause if it's not there already. Using a modifier key along with a letter is common, so I have the text expansion shortcut for that. It's k s s. And then I'll just type the letter C. I'll go ahead and add shift to the modifier keys, so I'll put a curly bracket in front of command comma after down, and then write shift down. The next keyboard shortcut is shift command P so I'll just copy this code and change the C to a P. Next we'll type capture full Now in the same way that we can't send a bunch of commands to the computer with AppleScript without it freaking out This happens for phrases and longer words using the keystroke method So the text expansion shortcut to get around this is text loop. The first field will ask you what you want to type So lets' type capture full. The next field is just asking for a variable name to differentiate between this and any future text loops that you might use in your script. So I'll just call this firsttypevar, push enter command S, and what this does is it sets up a loop and it will put a small delay after each key is pushed. Finally, we'll push the enter key, or the return key. The text expansion shortcut for that is enterkey, or returnkey, I put both just in case. Wink. And then the final step will be the conditional statement saying has this downloaded yet? And then clicking on the X. Go ahead and type continue loop. It'll ask you what the question should be, and I'll just put has it downloaded? push enter. Command S and then put your cursor inside of the clause where it says, "If the answer to the question is yes, do the following things" What we'll want to do first is activate Google Chrome again because sometimes when a prompt comes up, it'll change the focus from your previous program so type tella Google Chrome Then we'll click on the X. So I'll go ahead and go to Chrome Make sure that my window is centered Option Command Control C I'll do shift command C, and then wherever the X is for yours', hover over it command space to launch Alfred type mousecode, and then name of the coordinate marker I'll call it clickX and the Script Editor will jump over and put the code where we need it Before we run the script I'm going to go to the top and increase the delay to .4 Opening the Inspect Element panel sometimes takes a little bit of time, so we want to make sure that it opens then we'll start typing. So I'll do command R, shift command C typing wait for it to download There it goes, once it's all downloaded, I'll just push enter Boom, the panel closes Magic! If you have any questions or need any help, feel free to write a comment send me an email or join the productivity shop slack channel. Thanks for watching! [jingle]