Easy, Powerful Mac Automation for Creative Pros Using Keyboard Maestro

1. Introduction and Welcome!: This is a list of setup steps for one of my freelance tasks. And this is my Mac doing all of it for me using keyboard Maestro. Maybe you've got complicated error prone workflows that you have to get just right and some just plain boring stuff that you'd rather not do at all. What if you could shove all of that stuff off your own to do list and onto your mac, You can without programming using keyboard Maestro. Hey, I'm CK. And if you make a living with your mac, you should be using keyboard Mastro to help with everything I just described. Maybe you've never even heard of it. But compared to Apple's own automation tool shortcuts, keyboard Mastro is actually easier to learn, especially for non programmers. Imagine being able to hit one keystro to kick off a complex multi step workflow in the software you use most. Imagine getting more done in less time and with less stress. And the bonus, It turns out it's really fun to take control of your mac. We'll get up and running by building our first macro together right away. Then we'll step back for a tour of the keyboard Maestro interface. Then we'll build our second macro, which can double as your class project. Easy. Each lesson after that will add another feature to that second macro to show you even more possibilities and we demonstrate a bunch of tips and best practices along the way. All you need for this class is your Mac and keywork Maestro. You can get a free trial or purchase it using the links I've provided in the class description. For me, it's been the best $36 I've ever spent on my business. All right, let's get started. I can't wait to show you what you can do with your Mac. 2. Our Simple, Customizable Class Project: For your project, I'm giving you two choices and you can choose the one that you think will be most useful to you in your day-to-day work. Project Option 1 is the one that we'll build as an example together in our lessons. It's a macro that opens two applications that you use the most in your typical work sessions, or say your planning sessions that you use to start each workday. For example, maybe you use Apple Calendar and Reminders together to plan your day every morning. Or maybe you spend most of your day in Adobe Creative Suite and Behance.net or like me maybe in Logic Pro and ADSR. Just make a macro that launches the apps or sites that you need. The second option, you can roll your own. If you don't feel like the first option would be useful to you, feel free to come up with your own idea and then run it by me, and we'll figure out if it's going to be doable for you. To turn in your project, first, create a project: Go to our class and go to Projects and Resources, and click the big green "Create Project" button. Upload either an image of your macro or a link to a shared video of your macro running. To make an image of your macro, single-click any of the actions and then type Command A to select all. Then just choose Edit, Copy as Image. This puts a picture of your whole macro on the clipboard. You can then paste right into your project description. [MUSIC] To make a screen capture of your macro running, use the standard Mac commands according to your Mac model and OS version. Then just below the project description field of your project, find the Add More Content section, and click the "Video" button. You'll be prompted to provide a link to your video hosted elsewhere, for example, YouTube or Vimeo. Remember, if you want to do Option 1, we'll be doing that together as part of the lessons in this class. [MUSIC] 3. Let's Build Your First Macro!: I want us to have some fun right away. We're going to dive in and make our first automation, which is called a macro in Keyboard Maestro. But I'll be with you every step of the way and in the next two lessons, we'll take a closer look at the whole interface. If you haven't downloaded Keyboard Maestro yet, please take a moment to do so now. I've provided links for the free trial and the purchase in our class description. Go get it. You ready? Let's do it. We're going to create a Macro that lets you type a key combo like Command-Control something to open your most used application. Let's just say that I want to launch Pages, Apple's Word Processor, using a key combo. In Keyboard Maestro, look at the leftmost panel. It's labeled Groups, and come down here and make sure that Global Macro Group is selected. If it's not just single-click it. When you select a category here, that determines which macros are going to be displayed over here. It also means that any new macros we create right now by default are going to be in this group. We'll talk about why that matters a little bit later. Next, we can create our new macro by either typing Command-n as in New, or we can come down here and click this + button. I'm going to type Command-n and there's my new, Untitled Macro. Cool. You see that its name is already highlighted and ready for you to type in a new name, so let's call it Launch Pages. Definitely want to name your macros something meaningful. Always. That's what we would call a Best Practice for sure. Now, let's make our macro do something. Here's a fundamental for you. Every macro you create is going to have at least one trigger to kick it off and then it's going to have at least one action, which is the thing or things that the macro will do for you. In this case, our trigger is going to be a key combo or a keyboard shortcut. In Keyboard Maestro that is called a hotkey. If we cruise up here to New Trigger, which has the green + sign, we tap it and we see Hot Key Trigger as the first option. It's probably the one people use the most, but there are lots of very sophisticated options listed here too. Let's just choose Hot Key Trigger and then you see that it now says this hot key will execute the following actions. Because it's highlighted, it's ready for us to just type the keyboard combo that we would like to use. I'm going to choose something kind of extreme just to make sure that it's not already in use. Command Option Shift P for pages. Now that I've typed in my desired hot key, this is no longer highlighted, but if you want to come back and change this any point later, simply single-click it and it'll highlight again and you can type any other alternative that you'd like. Next, we need some actions. We need to tell this macro what to do for us. Right now it says No Action because there aren't any actions. You can just tap that, single-click it and you'll see that a new pane comes up. It's labeled Actions and these are all the possible actions that Keyboard Maestro gives us, and it's really exhaustive and really awesome. There's so much power in this list right here. You can see we have the All Actions category selected and if I come over here, it just so happens because these are sorted alphabetically, that the very first one is the one we want, Activate a Specific Application. I can grab it and drag and drop it. I could double-click it, or I could highlight it and press "Return". All three ways work and here it is. Now typing this hot key is going to execute these actions. There's just one: Activate Finder. That's just what it defaults to but you can see it gives us a little menu here to choose which app we want and in the top, it lists all the apps that are currently open to make it easy for you to choose one of those. Next, it lists recently used applications and then More will actually list every application on your system. If I choose that, I'll see that they're sorted alphabetically and I can cruise down here and just click "Pages" and not only does it fill it in, it renames this specific action now so that it says Activate Pages and it updates the icon to the standard Pages icon. That's pretty cool. It's the moment of truth. If I type this keyboard combo pages should launch, so what have I got here? Option-Shift-Command-P. Boom - we are in Pages that fast. Pretty cool. Obviously this is a very simple macro but even this can be super useful compared to, say, going like that. One keystroke versus 5, 6, 7. Great, there we are. YAY! Before we wrap up this lesson, let's take a little bit closer look at the other options in the Activate a Specific Application action. First, we see the All windows checkbox. That's pretty straightforward. If I've got multiple windows open in Pages, they're all going to become visible and the one that was currently focused will come to the front. If this is unchecked though, just that one that was focused will come to the front, reopen initial windows really ought to be called Restore minimized windows because that's what it does. If already at front, this one's pretty interesting. It defaults to leave it at the front. In other words, I've asked you to activate Pages if it's already at the front, I'm cool with that. However, it gives you three other options, each of which is a variation on "Get rid of it" instead, a toggle possibility. This one will switch to the last application that you had in front. This one will hide Pages and this one will actually quit Pages. Your key command now becomes more like a toggle, a smart or specific version of command-tabbing between applications. There you go. We have really quickly and easily made a macro that launches Pages for us with just a quick keystroke, pretty cool. There's so much more that you can do with Keyboard Maestro though, so stay tuned. Now we're going to review what we covered in this lesson. Now you know how to create a new macro. Rename your macro to something meaningful. Assign a hotkey trigger to fire off your macro and add actions to a macro. Those are the absolute fundamentals that you'll use every time you build a new macro. Along the way, you also learned some specifics about the layout of the main Keyboard Maestro window, hotkeys, also known as keyboard shortcuts, as triggers, and the action called Activate a Specific Application. Now it's your turn during a typical workday at your Mac, just make a note of anything you find that you do frequently, whether it's opening a particular application or doing a particular task. Make a note of it and share what you find out with the rest of us. Here's how. In our class, click the "Projects & Resources" tab, then click the green "Create Project" button and then just comment in your project. 4. Interface Pt. 1 - Super-Powerful Groups: Now that you've made your first macro, let's take a step back and look at the Keyboard Maestro interface a little more closely. It might not be very pretty, but it is pretty ding-dang powerful. We're going to split our tour into two parts. In this lesson, we'll focus on the surprisingly powerful Macro Groups column. Let's take a look. Here we are again in Keyboard Maestro's main window called the Editor. It's organized so that you start with more general information on the left and you get more specific as you go to the right. The leftmost column contains your macro groups. These are groups of related macros. At their simplest, you can think of them like folders for organizing your macros. But they can do something much more important and more helpful and powerful, which is to control when the macros in the group are actually available to use. Let's look at the group we used in the first lesson, the global macro group. It's right here. I'll click it and check out these settings. This says it's available in all applications, in all windows, and it's always activated. Global macro group is the one to use when you need a macro to be available anywhere, everywhere, all the time. For contrast, let's look at my Logic Pro group. All of these macros are only available when I'm actively using Logic Pro. I could go further and specify that a certain window has to be focused, or that a certain window must not be focused. Otherwise, these macros won't be available. I could also configure it so that when I launch Logic, Keyboard Maestro pops open a small floating window called a pallet, containing a clickable list of all of these macros. Finally, I could make it display in the menu bar, which is this guy right here. Now that I've got this configured to show a palette and display it in the menu bar, let's launch Logic and see what happens. Now we're seeing a floating palette - this is what we're talking about when we say a floating palette - with all of these macros available, clickable. There is now a Logic Pro group sub-header in the Keyboard Maestro Status menu with several of my commands there. Then the moment I switch out of Logic, both of those go away. Pretty cool. By combining these features, you could create a bunch of custom shortcuts for your favorite app and then make Keyboard Maestro display all of those shortcuts in a floating window whenever you run that app. Really, really powerful. To show another example, in this case, it's available in these applications, which means both of these, either of them. As long as I'm running either Safari or Chrome and I have a window focused with this phrase in the title, I'm good. By contrast, here we've got one that's okay for all applications. But it cannot have a focused window with either "Song Titles and Album Descriptions, or "Descriptions" in the title bar. It gets really specific. To wrap up this lesson, let's take a look at the toolbar buttons specific to the macro groups column. From the left, we've got Add a Smart Macro Group, Add a group, Delete a group, and Enable or Disable group. All of those are pretty self-explanatory, with the exception of Smart Macro Group. These are a lot like smart folders in the Mac Finder, which are basically saved searches. Instead of putting macros in this group manually, you use search criteria to specify the types of macros you'd like included. This results in a self-updating container for all macros related in some particular way. As an example, I have a client called Golden Rule. Every time I create a macro for my work for him, I make sure to include space hyphen space GR in the macro's name. That way it shows up automatically in this Smart Macro Group. You can tell where a macro actually lives in terms of its normal macro group by selecting it and looking in the upper right corner. The search criteria rules, and all the different possibilities, are spelled out in great detail in the Keyboard Maestro manual, so I won't go into that here. The main things for you to know are they behave just like Mac smart folders and they don't give you the boundary features that we saw in the normal Macro Groups. That's it. [APPLAUSE] Let's summarize what we've covered in this lesson. Now you have a good feel for why we care so much about Macro Groups. They go way beyond a simple folder. They allow you to restrict when macros are available, not just to a certain app, but even a certain window. Plus, they allow you to display your commands in a floating window or in the Keyboard Maestro status menu. Now it's your turn. Think back on the first macro we created, which launched an application using a hotkey command. Would it make sense for that macro to be restricted to certain contexts? There's no right answer. It completely depends on your situation. Just give it some thought. 5. Interface Pt. 2 - Low-Key Awesome Tools: Now let's look at the rest of the interface. In particular, there are several helpful toolbar buttons along the top and bottom of the Editor window, that can really speed things up for you as you're building and editing your Macros. Let's look at the rest of the interface. As I mentioned in earlier lesson, things go from general to more specific as we move from the left side to the right side of the interface, like column view in the Mac Finder. We've already looked at the first column, Macro groups. Our next column to the right is Macros. It's pretty obvious that this lists all of your Macros. The main thing to remember though, is if you don't see a Macro that you're expecting to see listed here, start by checking your selection in the Macro groups list, because of course, that will affect who gets listed over here. Secondly, be sure to check the search field up here in the right. If you've got anything typed here, that will filter in your Macros list. Just be sure to ex that out, and if you like, go to all Macros and then look for your Macro. Much like the Macro groups column, the Macros column has buttons at the bottom for important actions. We already know about this one for Add Macro. This will delete the selected Macro, and this will enable or disable the selected Macro. You could have Macros that you're not currently using, I have some of those. I don't want to delete them so I've just disabled them. Now, let's talk about this from a higher level. At the top center, you'll see some really powerful and useful buttons. The Share button shows the standard Mac share sheet. It even includes an entry for the Keyboard Maestro Forum, which is the discussion board, and that is a really helpful group of folks. If you're working on something, you can use this service to send your Macros straight to the forum and ask questions. Used is really helpful, it shows the most recently used Macros. This is amazing when you've just used a Macro and decided that you want to add to it or tweak something about the way it works. If you click and hold, you see a list and you can go to any of them and choose them. History is similar, but it shows the Macros you've viewed most recently. The tool-tip says that it shows edited most recently, but my experience is a little bit different. The same goes here for a long click. Modified, as you might expect, shows the Macros you've edited most recently. Clicking it again returns you to your previous view, and it has the same long click feature as the other buttons. Run, will run whichever Macro you're currently looking at. Now, let's check out the buttons down here. Try is run in that it runs something. However, it's super useful because it only runs the selected actions. Say this Macro has a couple main segments and I only need to test this one. I can hit ''Try'', and it will only run this portion of my Macro. Then finally, record. We're going to look at this further in a later lesson. It actually records your actions and that gives you a starting point for building a new Macro. You can then look it over to see how your own on-screen actions translate into Keyboard Maestro actions. I think this is so important that I'm going to devote a lesson to it, showing you how it works and having you practice with it. In my experience, these two Try and Record are the most useful of these lower buttons. The single most important thing to remember from this lesson is that the Macros list is always filtered by two things. The search field in the upper right corner of the Editor window and the currently selected Macro group over on the left. If one of your Macros seems to go missing, don't panic. Just clear the search field, choose All Macros and look again. A close runner-up for the most important takeaway, don't sleep on the toolbars. Up top, you've got the Used, History, Modified, and Run buttons. These are great navigation and testing shortcuts. Down at the bottom, you've got the Try button, which is super useful for running only the selected actions. Remember that try is also available in the gear menu of most actions and by right-clicking a compatible action. Clearly no rocket science involved, but these buttons are super useful, so don't sleep on them. 6. Our 2nd Macro - Simplest Possible Class Project: Now that you've got a feel for the interface, we're going to build another Macro. This one is actually going to be the simplest possible version of our class project. You'll want to be sure to follow along. This Macro is going to start simply, but in each lesson after this one, we're going to add on new features, so by the end we'll have a pretty cool setup. As we work, we'll look not only at the specific actions needed to make our Macro work the way we want, but also the fundamentals, the why behind each step in each decision and also the best practices that I recommend along the way. Let's get to it. You remember that when we're creating a new Macro, the first thing we want to do is choose the Macro group where we want it to live. For our purposes, let's stick with the global Macro group, just single click it to select it. Next we're going to type Command N to create a new Macro, there it is. Our new Macro is right here with its name highlighted, so I'm going to type planning setup and in return, this Macro is going to open the combination of apps that I use to plan my day. As I said earlier, this is a great example for you to work from when making your project for the class. Now we need a trigger, I'm going to use a hot key trigger, so I click the green new trigger button and choose hot key trigger. With the hotkey field highlighted, I press the key combo that I'd like to use to trigger this Macro. I'm going to use Command, Option Control Y. Because when I'm planning my day, I'd like to consider why I'm doing each task on my list before I add it to my day. Typing the Y just creates a little reminder for me. I'm using Command Option Control because it's extreme and so it's unlikely to already be assigned in any application I might be using when I issue this command. I tend to use that modifier for overarching global commands like this one that's going to start my day every day. Now it's time to add some actions. The first thing I want to do in this Macro is launch my planning project in the app that I use for that thing, which is called Curio. It's made by a company called Zengobi, and I've been using it for years, it's awesome. I'm going to single click this no action field to display the actions pane. Notice that the actions pane has its own search field and if the Actions pane is currently focused, meaning it's the active window in the interface, I can type Command F, which is the standard Mac shortcut for Find and my cursor jumps right up into that Find field. Something I want to point out here is that Keyboard Maestro gives you a really useful search results. We know that we want to open a file and without even knowing the name of the specific action that we need to do that in Keyboard Maestro, we can just type file and see what shows up , and it filters. I didn't need to hit Return or anything like that. Look at all these possibilities, here, open a file folder or application. That's the one we want. With that highlighted, I can just hit Return and it pops right up over in my Macro. We just need to tell it what file we want to open. Keyboard Maestro makes this easy by providing this little purple Browse button. If I click that, it opens the standard Mac OS open dialogue where we can go and find our file. I'm going to just use search and go to Curio. The name of the file I use is GTD home, and there it is. I make sure that this is the main file as opposed to the backup, and open and there it is. Now we've got our Macro setup to open my planning project. Notice that there's a stepper menu here that currently says default application. If you're opening a file that isn't specific to a particular apps such as a TXT, RTF, PDF, etc, you probably want to use this to specify your preferred application. I pretty much always do this just to be thorough. I'm going to do that now. There we go. So now I've told Keyboard Maestro I wanted to open this specific file and I want it to use Curio to do that. Just like we saw in our first Macro, this little menu is great because it gives us anything that's currently open and anything we recently used. Then if we need the list of every application on our Mac. That's everything we need to do here. There are a couple of other options worth noticing though. Over on the right, check out this gear icon. If I click on that, I see a bunch of helper commands that I can use to configure exactly how this is going to work, to try things out, to temporarily disable it. Notice that there's a command called Try Action. This is just like the try button that we learned about down here. It will run only the selected actions rather than running your whole Macro, which is what this button does. That's great for checking just one or a handful of actions to make sure they're doing exactly what you expect. You'll also see an option here to rename the selected action. This can be really helpful just for making your Macro as easy to review and understand as possible. This action is a great example because look at this, open Tilde documents Curio GTD blah, blah, blah. Maybe I rename it to something more plain language, like open my curio planning projects. Boom, much easier. Then there are two more choices that I'd like to point out right now. Failure Aborts Macro and Notify on Failure. This first one, it sounds pretty intense, Failure Aborts Macro dev con 5, but it means exactly what it says. If this action fails, stop the whole Macro. Let's think about this though, because this is really significant. If every action coming after this one is dependent on this one having worked, for example, I'm going into a Word processing document and I've got a bunch of automated edits like copies and pastes and deletes. The last thing I would want is for this to not work and whatever document happens to be sitting in the background gets all these destructive actions performed on it. If that's our scenario, then yes, we probably do want the Macro to stop if this specific action fails. But in this case, we're simply opening one file and then another. I think I'd like the Macro to continue rather than to stop. But I would like Keyboard Maestro to let me know what happened and that's what this one does. It does exactly what it says, Notify on Failure, so let me know if this guy fails. Cool. For this Macro, to me, it makes sense to turn this one off and leave this one turned on. So I selected it to uncheck it. If I wanted to check it again, I would just select it again, and there we go. Onward. Now, to plan my work for the day I need to also reference my calendar. We already know about activate application because that's what we used in our very first macro to launch pages. If I happen to use Apple Calendar then that's an app that I can open using exactly that same action. I would add, activate a specific application, and then I would set it to activate calendar. But I use Google Calendar, and that gives us a chance to check out a new action to open a specific webpage. I'm even going to show you a new way to find and add an action. There's a great keyboard shortcut that I would like you to get used to using when you're ready to add an action to your macro, it's Command Control A. What this is is insert action by name. But the way it looks, it's a whole lot like Spotlight, which is the macOS find utility. Just like I showed you in the Actions pane, when searching, we don't need to know the specific name of the action that we need, which makes Keyboard Maestro really great for learning and for beginners. I just know that I want to open a webpage, so I'm just going to type web and see what we get. Well, there we go. Open a URL, get a URL, remote trigger, and search the web. Clearly, this is the one we want, so I'm just going to double-click it, and boom, it gets added to my macro. Now, this looks really similar to our first action, there are a few differences though. First, instead of a file here we need a URL. It defaults to the Keyboard Maestro website, which is cute, but that's not what we want. What I'll do is open Safari and go to my calendar. I'll set it to the view that I like when I'm planning, which is to see my day but to see it in context of my whole week, busy. As you might know, if you use Google Calendar, there can be the day view, the week view, the month view, the next four days view, and the agenda or schedule view. I like to be here, and so that's the one I'm going to grab. We come over here, this is already highlighted, so I just paste and there we go. Now again, default application, I am going to go ahead and specify that I want it to use Safari. Again, just like with this guy, we see that the name of the action is descriptive at a high level, but it would be great if we went ahead and said, open my Google Calendar. Let's do that. This time I'm going to Control, click on it and choose "Rename", and say, open my Google Calendar in Safari. One last thing about the open URL action, before we go ahead and test our new macro, did you notice anything about the gear icon over on the right? It's got clock hands and it's also yellow to really stand out. These clock hands let us know that this action includes a timeout setting, meaning we can set how long Keyboard Maestro will keep trying to load this URL before it just gives up. Further, we have two more timeout-related options here in this menu. Similar to what we saw for failure, if the page doesn't load, do we abort the macro or no? If the page doesn't load, do I want to be notified with a little onscreen message? Based on the new timeout options that you see here, plus the failure options that you're already familiar with, how would you set these options for our example macro? We're back. Your decision might be different from mine, but for me, it makes a lot of sense that failure aborts macro doesn't really do much because right now, anyway, this is the last action in our macro, so it doesn't really matter. But if it weren't, I would only turn this on if the actions after this one would make a mess if the calendar URL didn't open. What about notify on failure? Yes, I'd want to know about it. Then timeout aborts macro, it's the same as this one. I don't really see the need for that, so I'm going to turn it off and then notify on timeout, yes. I would like to know if my calendar didn't open. We now have a macro that will open my curio planning project and will open my Google Calendar in Safari. To run it instead of hitting the hotkey, I'm going to use our Run button. Pop. There we go. Here's my calendar, and here's curio. Let's take a look at what we learned. Well, that was a big one. Now you know how to open a specific file, indicate which application Keyboard Maestro should use for any action that requires one, open a specific web address, easily identify whether an action includes a timeout setting, and set action failure and timeout options in ways that makes sense for your needs. Along the way, you also learned some great tips and best practices. One of my favorites is that even if you're new to Keyboard Maestro and you don't know what any of the actions are called, you can use Insert Action by name or Command Control A to bring up a search bar and just type something related to what you want to do. I know that the failure and timeout options probably seemed a little funky when we first looked at them, but they are really powerful and helpful, so don't sleep on those. If you insert an action in your macro and the name it ends up with doesn't really say much to you, take a moment to rename it to something that will mean something to you, and six months or a year, you will thank yourself later. Finally, when you're assigning a hotkey combo to a macro, stop and think about the context in which you'll use it. That will help you narrow down the available key commands that you can use for it and try to make it something memorable. Now it's your turn. Just like we did in this lesson, pick a couple of apps that you often used together and create a simple macro that launches the two of them together. You can do exactly what we did in this lesson, and then just substitute in the names of the apps that you need. Then click one of the actions to select it, and then type Command A to select all of them, and use the copy as image command to put a picture of your macro on your Mac clipboard. Then simply head over to our class, open your project, and paste in the image, all set. Always feel free to contact me with questions. It's my job to help you succeed, and I'm happy to do it. 7. Using WiFi as a Trigger: To me, one of the coolest things about Keyboard Maestro is this huge variety of triggers that you have available, so just events that can make your macro run for you automatically. One of those is Wi-Fi connection. This means, for example, we can make our planning setup run as soon as we connect to our office Wi-Fi, or maybe the Wi-Fi at our favorite coffee shop. That's pretty cool. Let's check it out. Here we are. I'm going to use the history dropdown to return to our planning setup. Great. In our macro, we've already got our hot key triggers setup. But, we can add another trigger without effecting this one. We're going to click the green plus button. You can take a look through here, and see all the different ways that you could trigger a macro to run. Like you change your audio from headphones to your MacBook speakers, for example. But if we come all the way down here, wireless network trigger, we'll choose that. Great. Now, we've got some options for setting this up to trigger exactly the way we'd like it. First off, it looks as if we need to tell Keyboard Maestro the name of the network. But, I've got a great tip for you. If you connect a network while the name field of this action is highlighted, Keyboard Maestro will fill the name of the network in for you. So that my macro doesn't launch while I'm trying to demonstrate this, I'm going to disable my macro by clicking here. Now the macro is disabled, but this field is still highlighted. I'm going to go up and just change to some other random network. Great. You see that it fills it in for me just by virtue of me selecting it. Let's see what happens here. I turned off Wi-Fi, and it changed this to disconnected. Because I've got this selected, Keyboard Maestro is watching my actions relative to Wi-Fi connection and setting these to match what I'm doing, I'll go connect it to my normal home network. There we go. Great. That's really about all there is to it. You can read about these other options in the Keyboard Maestro help, but you've got the main idea now, whenever I connect to this network, this macro will run. Pretty cool. Now, you know how to make a macro run for you automatically whenever you connect to a certain Wi-Fi network. Along the way, we also looked at a helpful tip, which is that if you have the name field selected and either connect or disconnect to a particular network, Keyboard Maestro will actually fill in the name of the network for you. Easy-peasy. Alright, now it's your turn to try it out. Go back to the macro you made for the previous lesson, and add a Wi-Fi trigger to it. Get it setup, and then take a screenshot of the Wi-Fi trigger portion of your macro, and paste it into your project so we can all see it. Cool. 8. Giving Our Macro Options With If, Then, Else: To get ready for this next lesson, let's imagine something. You're planning your weekend and you say to yourself, well, on Saturday, if it's super nice out, I'm going to go for a run and then maybe I'll grab a smoothie and go sit at the park to drink it. But if it's gross out, to make the best of it, I'll go to the gym and then maybe I'll go to the Matinee movie. So you just evaluated a condition, the weather, and decided on one set of actions for if it's sunny and a different set of actions for if it's not. That's what we call an if, then, else or a conditional operation. Keyboard Maestro can do that same thing for you and it's one of the most powerful actions you can learn how to use. We're going to use it in this lesson. Also in this lesson, we'll learn how to choose a menu command and how to evaluate the status of a menu command. Let's check it out. Here we are in Curio, this is the software I use for planning. And you'll notice this panel over on the right, this is a really powerful panel that shows all of my upcoming tasks across all of my different projects. It's called the Status shelf and I'd like the Status shelf to always display whenever I launch my planning setup, then it's pretty obvious why because it shows me everything I have to do. So you probably already know that in the typical Mac app, the View menu is going to give us access to the app's various panes and panels and windows. So let's see if that's the case here. View, it's called the Status shelf, so I see shelf and show shelf module and sure enough, there it is. In fact because it's the one currently displayed, it's got this checkmark next to it, so it's marked with a checkmark. Great. So over in Keyboard Maestro, let's use this information. First off, let's click our last action so that anything we add comes after that guy. Now, we'd know that we want to do something with a menu. I don't know what that action is called off the top of my head, but let's just use our friend Command Control A and we'll just type the word menu. Select or show a menu item and pop, hit Return to add it to the end of my macro. You'll see that this defaults to the front application, but it's always a good idea to specify which app you want it to work in. So if I click on this, you'll see this similar structure where all of the currently open apps are here, and then recent ones and then everything you've got installed. So because I'm running Curio, I can just choose it here. I also need to specify the exact menu title and item name if I want this to work correctly. But here's a great tip for you. Over to the right, there is a menu Menu and it lists the entire menuing structure of everything you currently have running, and so there is your tip. If you're going to use show Menu, go ahead and launch the app that you want to use it in and that way, Keyboard Maestro will lay out the menus for you and in our case, we can simply choose Curio, View, Show Shelf Module, and Status. Curio fills it in for us exactly the way we need it. Awesome. So I'm going to pull this down out of the way so that we can see what happens or better yet, maybe I'll hit Command K to open the Actions and return. I've just added the Activate application and I'm going to switch to Curio, but I want that to happen first. Just for demonstration purposes, we're going to activate Curio so that we can see what happens when we try this action. But I need it to come before that menu commands, so I just drag it and drop it. Boom. Great. So now I'm going to Shift click on that so both of these guys are now selected and right-click and choose, Try 2 Actions and see what happens. So did you see that over on the right? The Status shelf was already displayed and by choosing the menu command with it already displayed, we actually toggled it off and closed the shelf entirely. Definitely not what we want. Well, you've probably caught on by now that Keyboard Maestro is pretty smart and sure enough, it gives us a very smart way to deal with this thing. We can actually check on, peek at the status of a menu item and then only issue the command if that's actually what we need to do. So we're going to use a very versatile action to do this called if, then, else. You've maybe heard that phrase before if you're familiar with any programming concepts or you have any programmers in your life, but it's actually pretty straightforward. It lets you check on the current situation of something and then act accordingly. So for me, that goes something like this. If there's pizza in the fridge, then I'm going to eat that pizza. Otherwise, I guess I'll eat something else. In our case here, the setup is that if the Status shelf isn't already displayed, which would mean that there's no checkmark next to it in the menu, then we want to choose the command to display it. But if it's already checkmarked, then we don't want to do anything. It's just that simple. So let's add it to our macro. We'll bring up that search bar again with Command Control A, and just type the word if, and there it is. Boom. So the way we're going to set this up is if the Status shelf menu item doesn't have a checkmark, we want to choose the command. Otherwise, we don't want to do anything. So let's see what conditions we have available that would work for checking on that menu. Buttons, calculations, what's on the clipboard? Can you find an image on the screen? So many different options, but here's our guy right here, menu condition. Now, it defaults to saying a menu item with this name, copy is enabled. We know that we want the menu item called status. Exactly. So I'm just actually going to copy and paste it to make sure I get it exactly right. Always a good idea, especially if it's a complex name. Great. So we've got our menu name in there, but is enabled actually what we want to check on? Enabled means more is it available to choose versus being grayed out? And that's not what we want. Let's see if there's something that fits our situation better is marked, is not marked. Wait, exists, but is not marked. I think that's our winner because yes, it exists, but it doesn't have a checkmark by it. That's exactly what we want. So now all that's left is to say, here's what we want you to do. If that item is showing up the menu but doesn't have a checkmark next to it, what do we want you to do? And that's this guy. And because we saw earlier in this lesson how to reposition something in our macro, I'm just going to grab it and drop it right where it says no action, you see it's highlighted, and pow. So now, in effect, this says if there's a menu item called status, but it doesn't have a check mark by it, select it. If it does, don't do anything, and that's it. Two whole actions, one that's nested inside the other and suddenly our macro is smart enough to determine whether this panel is already displayed and if not, display it. Now, here's the thing, if, then, else is incredibly powerful and versatile. Anytime you run into a fork in the road where you need to go one way or the other, depending on some condition, this is your jam. Let me tell you if there is one technical or logical concept that it will pay off to grasp, it is this one. You will find 1,000 ways to use if, then, else, no lie. So I strongly recommend taking a few minutes to look through the different conditions. All of these different guys and then of course, consult the help by clicking the gear icon and choosing Help and it'll take you directly to the Help page for this action. Makes sense? Awesome. Now you know how to choose any menu item from any application automatically, and how to check the status of a menu item before choosing it. Use the if, then, else action whenever your macro comes to a fork in the road and needs different options depending on the situation and rearrange the order of actions. Along the way, you'll learn some great tips and best practices. In particular, when you're going to use a selector show menu item action, be sure to launch the application in which you want to choose the menu item. That way, Keyboard Maestro will set up the entire menu structure for you in the Options menu, making it super simple for you to choose exactly the right phrase. It's time for you to try this out in your own macro. If there's any window or pain or panel that you'd really like to show up in your macro setup, use what we've just learned in this lesson to set that up in Keyboard Maestro. 9. Windows Where You Want Them: Now we've got our planning setup macro running like a champ, but let's take it one step further. We can have Keyboard Maestro arrange the windows for us on screen so that we can view our calendar on one side while working in our planning software on the other side. Keyboard Maestro has built-in window positioning actions, and we're going to take advantage of those plus learn how they work. Window management is one of those seemingly small things that can actually make a big difference in just the flow and ease of your workday, especially if you switch between projects a lot. It also makes it a great example of having our Mac handle small stuff for us so that we don't have to think about it. Let's check it out. Great. Here we are again in Keyboard Maestro. Once again, I'm going to go to the modified menu and hold down and choose Planning Setup. That's an easy way to find it. I'm actually going to option-click one of these little disclosure triangles to close all these up and get us a little more visible space. I'm going to select our last action so that the actions that we add come afterward. Now I'm just going to hit our friend Command Control A. We know that we want to do something with a couple of windows. We need to resize them and reposition them. I don't know what that action is called. I know you've heard me say this a dozen times by now, but I really want to get it across that. This itself is a learning tool. I'm going to type window. There we go. Here's one called Manipulate a Window. When you get this little preview, it says "Minimize Front Window." Clearly, this is letting us do stuff to the size of the window. I'm going to hit "Return." It gets added. We noticed that even though this action was listed as Manipulate a Window, it came into our macro called Minimize Front Window. What you'll find in Keyboard Maestro is that a lot of actions have multiple specific abilities bundled into a single action. You just configure them differently to get to those different functions. This particular action is a great example. Everything it does is related to moving or resizing windows. If we take a look here, there's not just minimize, there's scale size, resize by an amount, resize to a specific size, moved by and move to, move and resize. In fact, you see presets for exactly what we're going to want, left column and right column. Before we choose that though, let's get just a little bit technical to see how window resizing works. This is probably the closest we'll tiptoe up to the edge of proper programming in this class, but don't worry, I'm going to explain everything. Knowledge is power. It's way better to understand how something works than just accept it. I'm going to choose full screen to give us something to work with here. Now, I'm going to shrink our window a little bit so that we can try this and see the difference because this is just acting on whatever happens to be the front window and whatever happens to be the front application. That of course, is this window in Keyboard Maestro. If I try this, it's going to affect the Keyboard Maestro window. Pow. It resized it to fill the whole visible screen. These settings, they look a little funky, they look a little complicated, but I'm going to talk you through what they mean. I'm actually going to use a little utility window from Keyboard Maestro itself. This is the mouse display window. This graphic represents the screen and the front window in the screen. You can pick which corner these numbers are relative to. When you're repositioning and or re-sizing a window, the top left corner is your ticket. Watch what happens to these numbers when I move to the top-left corner. That is our Ground 0. As I move to the right, the x value, the horizontal value, goes higher and higher. As I move downward, the y value or vertical value gets higher and higher. Once you understand, that these number of pairs represent horizontal and vertical values related to the position on screen and then also the width and height of the window you're working with, everything makes a lot more sense. Take a look at these first two fields. This one points to the right, and this one points down. Use these arrows to remind you this is how far we are to the right from the left edge of the screen, and this is how far down. As an example, I'll put some specific values in here. We'll give it an x value, a horizontal value of 200. That means it's going to go 200 to the right. I'll put a 400 here, so it's going to go 400 down. Now if I try this, watch what happens. Pow. It moved 200 to the right and it moved 400 down. Notice that the size didn't change at all. We didn't make any changes to these two fields. We only change the position. Now, if I replace these both with a zero and then try it, right back to where we started. We don't move any to the right and we don't move any downward. I hope that's exactly what you were expecting. Now that we have this part down, it's pretty easy to see what the next two fields are going to do. This one doesn't just point to the right, it points both directions and that's width. This one doesn't just point down, that points up and down. That's expressing the height. Something that I haven't mentioned yet as it relates to the position on the screen is that when our window jumps to the position we've indicated, it's actually its top-left corner that ends up at that x-y coordinate. When we used 200 and 400, roughly, it's the top-left to the window that's actually sitting at the coordinate 200, and 400. Makes sense? To the right and down, really is the theme of the day. Now let's talk about these two weird-looking guys here. These settings were filled in for me because I chose the preset of full-screen originally. But of course I can edit them if I want to just like I did the first two. Screenvisible is an example of what we call a function. It's like a helper that can go get information for us based on guidelines that we specify. The techie way that you say this is that we call the screenvisible function and we give it arguments like main and width to tell the function what we want. Then the function returns information about the visible screen. We use the info that the function gives us back to position and size our window. In fact, full screen, if you think about it, really just means please make my window the same size as the screen, whatever that happens to be. In this width field, we're saying, in effect, hey screenvisible take a look at the main screen and tell me its width. Then this height field, we're saying, hey screenvisible, go look at the main screen and tell me its height. By doing that, we're getting the full width value plunked into this field for us and we're getting the full height value popped into this field for us. These guys are in effect acting as placeholders for the specific number that we need without us having to know what that number is. This is a really smart and flexible way to work compared to filling in specific values. Now to see all of this in action literally, let's finally configure this action to put the calendar window on the right half of the screen. I'm going to choose move and resize and I'm just going to take the easy way and say right column. Then I'm going to do something else that's really important and I want to put this to you as a best practice to always do when you're using Keyboard Maestro. I'm going to use these two options to make sure Keyboard Maestro knows what window I'm talking about. This is going to be Safari. If I switch over to Safari, I can see that this window's name is always going to have this phrase Google Calendar in it. I can count on that. I'm going to go back here and say not just the front window, but the window with the title containing and then I'm going to type Google Calendar. Now at this point, you can probably lead a walk-through of what these settings mean. In all four, you see that we're calling the screenvisible function and it's returning the value that we asked for using the different arguments shown in the parentheses. That is the most interesting because of course we want it to be on the right half of the screen. We get the value of the midpoint of the screen and we use that as how far over to the right our window should be. Pretty cool. Here, similar but we're dealing with the width of the window. We ask screenvisible to tell us the width of the whole screen and then we multiply that by 50% to get half of that width. Now that we've got this setup, we can just duplicate it. I'm going to hit "Command D" and now we have another one. This one though, this is going to be for Curio. I'm going to choose Curio here. Let's go see what the title of it is, GTD Home. Using the same option, I can type in GTD Home and now I am guaranteed that this is the only window that it's going to try to do this to. That's great. Now I just need to set it. We want it to be on the left and so I'll choose left column and you can see how this change. This one didn't change at all because it's dealing with the width of the window. One is on the right half, one's on the left half, but they're both half as wide as the screen. That makes total sense. Then this one, it doesn't need to scoot it over to the right at all. It just gets the left value of the whole screen, which is going to be zero and puts it there. I could blank this out and put zero if I wanted and that would work. Make sense? Groovy. Now that we've got those both configured, I'm going to select both of them. I'm actually going to just scoot this whole window down so that we can see it happen ourselves. I'll go to the Actions window and choose Try 2 Actions, pow, and there it is. Curio is over on the left and my calendar's over on the right. Awesome. Simple as that. I realize it could have been a lot more simple if I had just chosen the presets and left it at that. But if I had done that, you wouldn't be armed now with the information of how this actually works so that you could take control of it even more if you'd care to in the future. Awesome. Let's wrap it up. Now you know how to reposition and resize a window. You know how to configure the move and resize options. You learned about functions and how to use the screenvisible function. You know how to duplicate an action in your macro and you know how to reorder actions within your macro. Along the way, you also learned some great tips and fundamentals. One of those is that several Keyboard Maestro actions actually are multiple actions contained in one and it's just a matter of configuring it to do the thing that you have in mind. Another thing you learned is that functions are like helpers that can go get information for us. Finally, a really important best practice, be as specific as you can when you're configuring each of your actions. This will make your macros much more reliable and stable and consistent. Now it's your turn to try it out. Go to your project macro and use move and resize to resize a couple of the windows. It doesn't even matter if it turns out exactly the way you want it to, I just want you to try it. When you've got it set up, copy as image to put a picture of your macro on your clipboard and then paste it into your project in our class. As always, feel free to contact me with any questions. I'm always happy to help you. 10. Rocking That Record Button as a Learning Tool: As I was building this class, naturally, I thought about my goals. I'd have to say one of the biggest ones was to help you feel as empowered as I do by do-it-yourself automation. Keyboard Maestro really makes me feel like I'm in charge rather than just a spectator with my own Mac, and that's huge. So I wanted to share that with you. But if you get mad about that idea, it means that I should empower you to learn on your own without me. That's why we're going to devote this lesson to one of the most important learning tools, in my opinion, that's built into Keyboard Maestro, the record button. We mentioned the record button while touring the interface, and in this lesson, we're going to demonstrate it and also look at some effective and not-so-effective ways to go about it. As part of demonstrating the record button, we're also going to learn about the comment action is just a simple action that lets you type in some comments or paste in an image, whether that's to outline, a new macro, and the way you'd like it to work, or to document a completed macro so that you understand how to use it and maintain it years from now. Very, very useful. Let's take a look. Here we are back in Keyboard Maestro. In the intro to this lesson, I talked about comments as an action, they're just a utility action. They don't do anything, there's simply a space for you to leave a comment to explain maybe how your macro is working or any other contexts that you might need to edit it in the future, to use it in the future after some time away from it. As a best practice that might be of interest to you, when I started using Keyboard Maestro, I would use just comment actions one after another to create an outline of how I thought my macro might end up working. It needs to do this, it needs to do that, it needs to do that. Then as I've figured it out, I would just fill in the actions in between the comments. Then I discovered the group action whose sole purpose in life is to actually act as a container for a set of related actions. This is another great tool to use, the group action, as an outlining tool for setting up a new macro and sketching out how you think it might work because you can actually create your macro right into your group actions. Enough about that degree, although I would call it a best practice. What we're here to do right now is to try out the record button as both a utility for generating Keyboard Maestro actions to do what you want them to do but also as a great way to learn more about actions that are available to you and things that Keyboard Maestro can do for you. We want to start with a brand new empty macro, I'm going to click Global Macro Group and brand new Untitled Macro, I'm going to call it Add a comment because that's what we're doing. Now, we mentioned the record button briefly when we did the interface tour back in our first couple of lessons. You might remember, it records whatever you do on the screen, your mouse clicks, your menu actions, and so forth, and it generates, as best it can, the corresponding Keyboard Maestro actions to replicate, to re-enact what you did. It's a great way to build at least a framework of a new macro by just letting Keyboard Maestro watch you and record what you do. But there are good approaches and not-so-good approaches, and we're going to demonstrate that right now so that you can see exactly what I mean. What we're going to do, we're going to build a macro that adds a comment using a hotkey trigger. I'm going to click record and then we're going to use a very mouse-focused way of setting up this macro. It's counted off for me and now it's recording, I'm going to hit the Plus button to add a new action, I'm going to go to the All Actions category, I'm going to go to Comment, and I'm going to double-click Comment, and then I'm going to stop recording. Let's see what we got here. Oh, boy. Move and click the mouse at this x, y location. Aren't you glad you know that?Move and click the mouse, scroll, scroll, move and click the mouse. There's our comment that got added when we actually double-clicked this guy so that it could be recorded. So that doesn't really count, I'll delete it, and then move and click. Predominantly, move and click actions. It's all correct, but is it good? No, not really. It's just moving the mouse around on the screen with no particular meaning behind it. There are a few reasons that that is a problem. One, there's nothing here that says which application to do it in or which window other than front window here and there. It could be anything, if I ran this with the wrong application focused like Adobe Creative Suite, we'll have the mouse running around clicking and making messes. In short, this macro would be super unreliable because it's so general. Secondly, we don't like that we can't really look at it and tell very well what it's doing for us, and that makes this macro harder to maintain and edit and so forth in the future. We could figure it out, we could try each of these, and then I could rename it, and then I could try this one and rename it, and try this one. So you get the idea, who wants to do that? I don't. We can do a ton better just by taking a little bit different approach. We're going to try that. This second time around, we're going to use the main menu instead of mousing around. First, before we do that, I'm going to just make sure I'm focused here by clicking and then hit Command+A to select all, right-click and disable these guys so that they're still there for reference, but they're not going to fire, they're not going to do anything, and then I'll click that one so that the recording gets added after it. Cool. Now we're going to hit Record again, and this time we're going to use the main menu. If we look around, we see Insert Action. I don't even know which of these it would be in front of, maybe Keyboard Maestro. Yeah, comment. That's what we're going to do. We're going to go to the edit menu and we're going to wrap down to that. Let's give it a shot and see if it gives us a better result. Count down. Here we go. Edit, Insert Action, Keyboard Maestro, Comment. Bam, and we're done. We just got this one move and click, which is getting us up to the edit menu. We've got the comment that resulted from actually choosing the menu command, so that doesn't even really count. Look at this guy, this beautiful, specific, clean instruction to choose specifically Keyboard Maestro, edit menu, sub, sub, and finally comment, and that's the only thing we need. So we can get rid of this, and that's it. This is a lot better in several ways. It's much shorter, it's super obvious, we can tell exactly what it's doing and where, and it's specific. It's only doing one thing and it can only do that thing in Keyboard Maestro as opposed to any other random front window. It's choosing a specific menu command in a specific application rather than clicking around in space. But both approaches were beneficial because both showed you actions that you didn't know about before, and that's likely to keep happening when you use the record button for the first several months that you use Keyboard Maestro, you might keep finding new things. That's it. Let's review what we covered. Now you know how to add a comment to your macro, to describe how you want it to work or how it already works. How to use the record button to capture your onscreen actions and convert them into Keyboard Maestro actions as a starting point for a new macro or section of a macro. You learned how to try different approaches when using the record button and pick the best results. Along the way, we reinforced my very favorite best practice: be specific. Be as specific as you can when choosing and configuring the actions in your macro. This will make your macro way more stable and reliable in the long run. 11. Thank you - and What's Next: [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC] Thank you so much for being here. Your time is really valuable that's why you're taking the class and I do sincerely appreciate it. Here we are at the last official lesson. I hope this class has shown you how easy and fun it can be to make your Mac work for you. I'll be continuing these lessons with deeper dives into specific actions and tools, including with Keyboard Maestro and that applied to automation in general. Be sure to follow me to receive notifications about those new classes. I want to reiterate some super important things. First, feel free to contact me with your questions. It's my job to help you succeed and it makes me really happy to do. Secondly, your project can be as simple or as complex as you'd like, but I really want to see a project from you. Contact me with any questions. Again, I'm happy to help. Have fun [MUSIC]