Now on Twitter—and praise for Anne-Marie Concepción, the Vin Scully of lynda.com

Automated Workflows now has a company account on Twitter: @scriptsmatter

It's my first venture into Twitter-dom, and I owe many thanks to Anne-Marie Concepción. Her excellent Twitter for Business course at lynda.com was very helpful. I’ve viewed several of Anne-Marie’s courses over the years, and they were all outstanding.

Anyone who has followed Anne-Marie’s career at Seneca Design, InDesignSecrets and elsewhere knows that she is extremely knowledgeable about the publishing world and covers some other fields as well. I’ve seen her give conference presentations on InDesign and would rank her among the best.

Confession: I have a very critical nature. Show me an Apple keynote and I’ll list 20 things which could have been done better. I’m so critical that when I’m leading a seminar I think, “Please, please don’t let there be anyone in the audience like me.” I don’t want to see that person's feedback form.

Still, there are many top-notch presenters and trainers deserving of praise. Among lynda.com authors, Anne-Marie is the best. What makes her so special?

Then I realized…Anne-Marie as the Vin Scully of lynda.com. Yes, I love baseball. And although I’m not a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers, frequently I will tune into a Dodgers broadcast just to listen to Scully call the game. He’s simply remarkable, broadcasting the entire game solo as opposed to the two- or three-person crews covering most other teams. The rest of the announcers have conversations with each other throughout the game. Somehow Scully manages to have a conversation with the viewer.

That’s what Anne-Marie does at lynda.com: she has a conversation with the viewer. There are some very good lynda.com authors, but it is obvious many are reading from a script. Not so with Anne-Marie. She comes across as having something to share with you—the viewer—and she wants you to know it because it is important, as if she were talking with you at a coffee shop. That's very challenging to do when it is just you and a computer in a recording room.

In general, I find lynda.com a great resource, well worth the monthly fee my business pays. Imagine all the various Mac programs which people ask me to automate. Knowing a program well is just as important as knowing a scripting language. How can I keep track of the ever-changing features?

I could turn to documentation, books and web searches, but the written word often goes to torturous lengths to describe an interface, with long descriptions and screenshots spread across multiple pages. Videos are so much better for this type of learning. What about free videos on YouTube and elsewhere? A few can help, but the lynda.com courses are far more consistent in quality, and the interface has some very helpful features, such as the complete written transcript (love it) and the new ability to save notes.

With all that being said, not everything at lynda.com is great. I can’t recommend the AppleScript course, even as an intro. And the most common problem is authors talking way too fast. As in I've-got-so-much-to-tell-you-but-want-to-keep-this-section-under-x-minutes-so-I-will-cram-in-so-much-that-you-will-retain-almost-nothing. Critical me.

Back to Anne-Marie. I've received nothing but positive feedback when I’ve recommend her courses to others. Don't think she does this well just because she is a natural. A lot of hard work goes into each video course, to say the least. At last count, she appears to have done 22 videos on social media and Adobe products. In my mind, that’s the equivalent of writing 22 technical books. Wow.

I don’t know the inner workings of lynda.com, but I would hope there is some type of internal course for first-time video authors—something every presenter must view before developing a course. If there is such an internal video, by all means it should be done by the best: Anne-Marie Concepción.

Full disclosure: I’ve met Anne-Marie three times at events, and about 10 years ago she was kind enough to make a home-cooked dinner for me and a travel-weary Australian in the land of Chicago. A memorable meal.

-Ray Robertson
ray@automatedwork.server323.com

Macworld Article > Power tools: Make events on your Mac trigger iOS notifications

automator-icon_580-100036496-large

Let’s say you’ve got a really cool Automator workflow that saves you tons of time but takes a while to run. Do you really have to sit around, twiddling your thumbs while waiting for it to finish? Wouldn’t it be nicer if you could go get a latte instead and get an alert on your iPhone when the workflow is finished? That’s just one example of the kind of thing possible with the latest version of If This Then That (IFTTT). [Read more on Macworld.com...]

Send Keynote 6.2 Presenter Notes to Evernote with AppleScript

A while back, I wrote an article for TUAW that demonstrated how to send presenter notes from a Keynote presentation to Evernote. This week, Apple released Keynote 6.2, and it contains some updated terminology. Here's an updated version of the script, which works with Keynote 6.2.

NOTE: You can download an example presentation containing presenter notes here.  You can download the completed AppleScript here.

Macworld Article > 5 Automator workflows everyone should have

automator-icon_580-100036496-largeI meet a lot of people with Automator anxiety: they think using OS X’s built-in workflow-maker is a lot more complex than it really is. The truth is that Automator workflows are (a) pretty simple to assemble and (b) great for simple but repetitive tasks that you do all the time anyway.

To show you what I mean here are five workflows that I think pretty much every Mac user should have. They do things we all need to do: Wrap text in quotation marks, for example, or count the number of words in a selection of text. There might be other ways of doing the same things, but Automator is built into your Mac and you can implement them yourself for free in a couple of minutes.

[Read more on Macworld.com...]

TUAW Post > Adding Copy to Clipboard Rollovers in Contacts App via AppleScript

contacts_scriptApple's Contacts app includes a lot of great shortcuts for initiating different forms of communication. Just click an email address, phone number, or URL field label to display a list of available options. You can send an email, show a phone number in large type, or start a FaceTime call, for example. Curiously, one shortcut that's absent from most of these popups is one for copying the email address, phone number, URL, etc. to the clipboard. Mailing addresses are one exception, as they provide an option to copy a mailing label. But, other fields don't include this option. Sure, you could just select a phone number, email address, URL, etc., and press Command+C to copy it. But, what fun is that? It sure would be nice if there were just more handy copy to clipboard shortcuts instead. With the help of AppleScript, you can add your own. Here's how...

[Read more on TUAW...]

MacTech Article > Migrating AppleScript Studio Apps to AppleScriptObjC (Cocoa-AppleScript)

For years, AppleScript Studio provided scripters with a framework, through Xcode and Interface Builder, for implementing Cocoa interfaces in AppleScript-based apps. When it comes to AppleScript, end users are often accustomed to faceless apps that simply run when launched and quit when finished, with minimal feedback along the way. AppleScript Studio gave developers the power to implement feature-rich and user-friendly interfaces, which allowed users to configure script behavior, displayed progress during processing, and gave scripts the look and feel of virtually any other OS X app.

In August of 2009, Apple released Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). At the same time, AppleScript Studio was deprecated and its official replacement, AppleScriptObjC, also known as Cocoa-AppleScript, was announced. AppleScriptObjC provides all of the benefits of AppleScript Studio, but with numerous additional benefits such as the ability to integrate scripts with any Cocoa framework in OS X.

Today, in Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), Xcode no longer supports AppleScript Studio. Xcode includes project templates for creating AppleScriptObjC apps, but all references to AppleScript Studio are long gone. For long-time AppleScript Studio developers, this raises some core questions about supporting and migrating existing apps.

[Read the full article in MacTech magazine's March 2013 issue, available in print and in the MacTech iPad Newsstand app]

 

TUAW Post > Extract App Resource Icons with AppleScript

scriptWhether I'm preparing for a demo or writing an article, blog post, book, or technical documentation, I often find myself performing the same set of repetitive steps. I need to navigate into an app's packaged resources folder, find one or more icon files, occasionally convert them to PNG and scale them, and add them to my document, Keynote presentation, etc. Fortunately, this doesn't need to be a manual process each time, thanks to the following AppleScript.

[Read more on TUAW...]

TUAW Post > AppleScripting OmniFocus > Send Completed Task Report to Evernote 2

ofocus_scriptIn February, I provided instructions for using AppleScript to send completed task reports from OmniFocus to Evernote. The script was quite well received by readers, and I received numerous requests for enhancements. This post provides an updated version of the script, which includes a number of additions. The script now supports full project paths and additional task details including the context, estimated time, start date, modification date, completion date, and notes. This additional content is optional, and you can adjust the script to not display it if you wish.

[Read more on TUAW...]

TUAW Post > AppleScripting Email > Developing a Quoted Reply Service

outlook_autoA reader recently wrote to me with a problem. Apparently, Microsoft Outlook no longer contains the ability to create quote level chunks of text when replying to messages in plain text format. Why this functionality was removed, I can't say. But, with a little help from AppleScript and Automator, I was able to help the reader to add this functionality back via a Service. Better yet, the Service can be set up to work in any email client, or even systemwide in any app. Here's how you can do it...

[Read more on TUAW...]

Macworld > Ask the Script Doctor: Deduping Contacts and more

scriptdoctorIn previous columns, I answered questions on scripting Mail and working with text. This time, I’m answering some questions I’ve received on a variety of topics, including:

  • Showing the Library folder in OS X
  • Deduping Contacts
  • Getting started with AppleScript

[Read more at Macworld.com, subscribe to the print edition, or get Macworld on your iPad...]

Do you have a scripting problem or a question for the Script Doctor? Send it to scriptdoctor@macworld.com.