 If you are at all confused by all of the different Mac automation apps that I've been mentioning recently, then stick around, because hopefully this video should shed a little bit more light on it for you. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec. And over the recent weeks, I've been making quite a few videos about Mac automation apps and how I use them on my Mac. And I realized that it can be a little bit confusing because I'm talking about lots of different applications, understanding sort of how these all fit together into a sort of bigger picture really, because there is a lot of overlap in terms of the functionality of them all as well. So it certainly can be confusing to understand which to use for which and so on. So that is why I thought I would make this video today. Now, I do intend to actually create a whole series of videos about each of these. So you may have noticed that some of my videos have been beginner's guides and then just one video. Well, there is more to come because I'm gonna do the beginner's guides to all of them and the advanced guides and then sort of start to piece them all together into a sort of overall cohesive productivity system which basically details how I use them all together. Now, I'm not gonna be able to go over all of my little automations in these videos because I've literally got thousands of them, but I can certainly put together sort of the building blocks of them so you can see how you may use these pieces of software all together to help you get more done on your Mac. And incidentally, this was really the goal of this channel when I started it out. It was intended to be a sort of Mac productivity channel to show how to make better use of your Mac, but I went down the Ecamm Rathole, which I love, purely because I love the software so much and so it was in using Ecamm to make this video and all these videos for my channel and other videos as well that just fell in love with it. And so that's why there's been quite a lot of Ecamm heavy stuff on my channel recently which will continue, by the way, because I'm still loving it and they're still making more and more improvements to it all the time. And the other thing that's featured quite heavily is the Stream Deck, because that's another gadget that I've just totally fallen in love with. But fortunately, all of these things work well together and Stream Deck especially works perfectly with all of these productivity tools as well. So let me get onto it, shall I? And I've done something. Are you ready? Are you ready? I've made a slide. I've made a slide because what I'm gonna do is I'm basically going to run through all of the different apps that I'm currently using for automation and then just sort of give you an overview of each one and where I use each one and how I use each one. So we've got Automata, Keyboard, Mystro, Hazel, Text, Expander, Moom and Alfred. Some of these are more essential than others but you'll see why I've included them a little bit later. So the first one that I've included that I haven't really talked about much on the channel as yet, but I will be making some videos about it, is Automata. And a lot of people don't know that Automata is actually built in to every Mac. It is Apple's own automation software and there's a huge proportion of the Mac user base that doesn't actually know that it's there or the power that it has in it. So I've included it here for that obvious reason and I do use it for some specific use cases. In fact, this video was prompted because I got a question on Twitter. By the way, if you're not following me, it's takeonetech underscore. I know some cheeky monkey had got to take one tech before me, about two years before me to be fair. So it's not like anything sneaky about it. But anyway, takeonetech underscore if you wanna follow me on Twitter. But somebody had asked me cause I mentioned in the last keyboard Mystro video that I did, I mentioned that I also use Automata. And the question was why do I use Automata when keyboard Mystro can do most of the things that it can do? What is it that it can't do basically? So there is a few things that Automata does that keyboard Mystro can't do. And so I'll come on to explain those a little bit later. I've also done videos about Hazel, TextExpander and Moom. I haven't done a video yet, but it's coming about Alfred because I do use Alfred as well. And Alfred is basically, if you're familiar with Spotlight on the Mac, which is the Mac's built-in search function, then Alfred is kind of like a sort of Spotlight on steroids, if you like. It's a much better for me, than a search tool to search the Mac from the keyboard just by initiating it with Command Space. I've replaced the Spotlight with Alfred now. Now there is some other advanced automation stuff that Alfred can do, but I'll mention that a little bit later as well. So first of all, I've sort of created some categories of different things that they do. And then we're gonna basically build out this matrix to show you what each of them does compared to each one and then which ones I use for which, if that makes sense. So the first one is there is a couple of differences or there is two different ways that automations can work. There's some of them that can work in the background. So you basically just set up whatever automation is and then it just works away doing its thing without you even really being aware that it's done it. You just know that it's done, if that makes sense. But then there are other ones that require some sort of trigger, some something to initiate the actual automation. And there are various ways that you can trigger them. So keyboard triggers is one, the keyboard shortcut or something like that. So first of all, for keyboard triggers, all of them can be triggered by keyboard shortcuts except Hazel. Hazel is the one that can only be, only just basically works in the background. But all of the others, you can create some sort of keyboard shortcuts to initiate them and then you're gonna perform some action. The next one down is folder actions. Now, this is basically where Hazel excels because Hazel only does folder actions. It basically, all its job is, is to watch a folder and then it notices something happening with that folder or the contents of the folder, I beg your pardon. And then it performs an action based on the criteria that you've set. Now, I did do a video about this. So this is the time when I point up in the top and say, I'll link to that video. And I've got more videos to come on Hazel, but basically in a nutshell, as I say, it just watches a folder and it'll perform some actions. The example that I gave in the introductory video was I have it watching my downloads folder. And when I download anything from Adobe Stock, for example, Hazel notices that there is a new file appeared and that it has come from the Adobe Stock website. And so it then files it away for me in my Adobe Stock photos file. I also have it, for example, my e-cam live recordings that are recording these videos. They're recorded live to tape, as it were, or to disk. And so I have them on the hard drive of my Mac Mini, but then after they've sat there for two days, I have it automatically archive them and put them somewhere else. So it just means that they're not clogging up my main hard drive, it's put off to an external drive. So that's the sort of thing that Hazel can do. Now, Automator and Keyboard Maestro can both do this as well. You can program this in those to do it as well. But I keep anything related to folder actions. So basically my automated filing, I just have that all handled by Hazel because I find it a lot easier to actually create these little automations in Hazel. And secondly, it just means that they're all in one location and it's just far easier to work with. It does one thing and it does it extremely well. And that will be a bit of a theme as we go through some of these other ones as well. The next one is text expansion. So text expansion can be done by Automator, Keyboard Maestro, Text Expander and Alfred. So this is where basically you type a couple of little keystrokes and then it populates the field or whatever you're in or file with a whole load of text. So it expands from a couple of little snippets of text to a couple of little keystrokes rather to a whole snippet of text. So the example that I use for this is like basically storing email addresses and things like that. You don't wanna be typing out your whole email or your whole address or your whole web URL or something like that. So you can just type a couple of little keystrokes and it will just expand it to be your full email address. But you can do a lot more than that as well. So I've done an example on Text Expander recently where it could basically, you could just copy someone's email address and then it could go and populate an entire email with the email address, the subject and then maybe adding in some like company information. I use it for things like creating quotes, contracts and all that sort of stuff as well. And the app that I use for this, you might be surprised to learn, given we're talking about text expansion, is Text Expander. Again, it's one of these apps that does one thing and it does it exceptionally well. If you want to go and create text snippets and things like that in Keyboard Maestro, you have to open up Keyboard Maestro same with Automator and Alfred actually as well. You have to open it up and go and create these and there's a certain process to it that is a little bit more sort of long-winded I guess than Text Expander. Whereas with that, there's a little shortcut to in the menu bar to create new snippet and it's as easy as that to just create something new. Also, Text Expander notices when you're typing the same things over and over again and it will say to you, hey, I've noticed you're doing this. Do you want to create a snippet from this thing that you've just typed, 10 times in the past couple of days or something like that. So it's actually prompting you as well to help you save time. So I use Text Expander for anything related to text expansion. Now there are occasions actually where I do want to do this through Keyboard Maestro as part of a bigger macro. But in that case, I still actually have the main Text Expansion snippet stored in Text Expander and I just actually activate it from within Keyboard Maestro. It's just, that's just the way my mind works. I know then that all of my little snippets are in Text Expander. I say little, some of them are literally reams of text long, whole contracts and things like that that can be just initiated with a couple of little keystrokes. So big fan of Text Expander. The next one is Window Management and that is by Window Management, I mean positioning windows on the screen in the ways that you want them. So if you want, you know, you've got a document open and a website and you want them side by side so that you're typing something while you're doing some research or something like that or maybe you're looking at some data and you've got your Excel file and something else that you're looking up. Whatever the case, if you want to position windows on the screen and have some sorts of automation so that you can always put them back into the same places, there are a few options. And once again, Automator and Keyboard Maestro can both do this and so can Moom and Moom. Once again, we're coming back to, it is a specialist app and it does this and it does it very well. It's all about Window Management. So whilst you can do it in Keyboard Maestro or Automator, I will always use Moom for Window Management. And I have a whole series of setups. So for example, when I'm recording a video, I want to have my e-cam live there. I want to have any, whoops, sorry, hitting the mic's done there, having any sort of demo windows or Safari or things like that open so that they're framed properly for the screen sharing or things like this. You know, this is framed in the correct location for me to do this screen sharing. So I have it for that. I also have it for Zoom calls and in that case, I still need my e-cam live open for the virtual camera, but I don't want that front and center, I want that over to the side, smaller window and my Zoom full screen and things like that or larger screen. There's lots of different use cases where you want windows all arranged in different places. And like I say, you can program this all in Keyboard Maestro, but it's very finicky by comparison because you have to go and set the location of different windows individually and referencing where you're referencing them from from like the top corner or whatever. It's just a bit of a long workaround when compared to Moon, because Moon, you can just put all the windows where you want and then click Save and save it as a snapshot so that they're all in that position. And then you can assign a shortcut key to it. And then when you press that shortcut key, everything just goes into that position. And the great thing about it is if ever you do need to update this so you decide well now I actually need to add something else into this workflow and so I need this extra window there all the time as well. Rather than having to go in and reprogram that, you just basically update the snapshot and it's just a lot smoother and a lot slicker. It can also do general things like just snapping to the left or the right or the top or the bottom if you've just got an ad hoc window placement if that even is a thing. Anyway, I did a video all about Moon as well. So we'll leave a link to that up in the top corner. All of these apps will be linked in the description obviously and all of the videos I've done related to these will be in the description as well. And I'll also at the end leave a link to the productivity app playlist which I'm gonna create because I've got a playlist for apps. I've got a playlist for set apps but I think I'm gonna have a playlist specifically for sort of productivity sort of stuff as well. So that is window management. The next one is internet search. So there is ways that you can, obviously you can just open a browser, can't you? But with Automata, Keyboard Maestro and Alfred you can actually search the web. If you're, for example, you've got a bit of text and you just wanna search on that specific bit of text rather than opening Safari or Chrome or whatever it is and then going and typing it in or pasting it in. And then there's also Alfred which has got this as a, basically when you do a search in the same way that you would search with Spotlight it actually brings up a whole series of different web-related searches. And you can search on Wikipedia, search on Google, search on different search engines or search locations. And that can all be programmed into Alfred. So it means that if there's something you want to look up you can actually just with typing whatever it is you want to look for and then have it look in that specific location. So I do use Alfred primarily for this for doing just sort of ad hoc searches. I do also do it in Keyboard Maestro though where I've got it as part of a macro. So for example, I can just click on if I'm copying a bit of text for example I can just click a button and it will search the copied text the last thing that was copied on the clipboard. So there is a couple of times where I do have a few actions built into or set up rather in Keyboard Maestro but in general I use this with Alfred. Now the next few are Mac services. So these are all basically as you will see all automated only features. And Mac services are if you look up in the menu bar of the Mac when you've got any application open you've always got as well as all the different menus like the file, the edit or whatever type of menu it is you've always got one that has got the name of the application itself. And so if you click in that you've usually got the preferences for that application but there's also a thing in there called services and these are basically system wide little automations little little actions or things like that that you can perform. Now there are a load of them built into the Mac but with Automator you can actually create your own. And these tend to have, now I'm just realizing I've not talked about Apple Script or things like that because that is more like the language as opposed to the actual application but you can program with Apple Scripts and JavaScript and things like that you can program little services that sit up in that menu. So that is something that I do use Automator for where I've got things that I want to have specifically in that services menu. The next thing is creating standalone apps and once again Automator is the only thing that you can use to do this. So all of the others they actually run within their own app whereas with Automator you can actually basically create some series of Automator actions and then basically package these all up as a standalone application. Now where might you want to do that? Well perhaps you might want to have an application that sits in your dock that when you click it it actually goes and opens a whole load of other applications so you might have like a work mode for example app that sits in your dock and when you click it it opens up a whole series of applications, shut down some others. That might be a use case you have for it. I don't actually use it for that but that would be an example. Now you can basically do anything or almost anything that you would want to do in a standalone app. You could just do it in keyboard maestro and have it triggered by a keyboard shortcut instead of being an app but sometimes it's handy to have it as an app in the dock. The other thing that you could do is have it that performs a certain number of actions like for example you can make a little app that sits in the dock and then if you've got a whole series of files you just drag them onto that app and then it will zip them all up and create a zip file to you know if you're gonna send them off to someone. So there's a whole series of things where you may like it as a workflow to have it as a standalone app. I do have some of these that I've got that are hanging around that from you know things that I've created before but to be honest with you I do tend to just do all this sort of stuff with keyboard maestro now especially now that we can link this with the stream deck as well which is relatively new to me compared to all these other things I've been using for you know 16 years or more whereas the stream deck is relatively new to me within the last year but yeah now I prefer to just sort of press a button or a keystroke for most of these things. So another thing that you can't do with these others is recording macros and that is something that is again specific to automator. So basically these last three are the reasons why I still have automator as part of my workflow and as opposed to just only keyboard maestro and by record macros what I mean is you can actually just set it recording and then go and do a series of tasks and it will create an automation from that. So I use this one. It's often when I'm doing something that is a series of repetitive tasks but maybe it might be just for the day. If I'm doing something specific on a specific website where like let's say for example I'm downloading a load of data and it's on over several pages and so I've got to go to the page, download some data, go back to the page click to the next page, download some more data maybe paste it into a different file and if it's something that is repetitive and I'm going to be doing it over 30 pages of data or something like that on a website just as an example that would be an ideal thing to do with automator where you just click record, do it once and then say now do that 30 times and it would just go away and do it. So I use it more for the recording macros for kind of little ad hoc tasks that are either something that I'm doing in one day or maybe for one week or something like that and I know that I'm not going to have it there for years like most of my other actions so I don't necessarily need it sort of clogging up my keyboard maestro. So that is the other use case that I have for automator. But essentially out of all of these apps really these top four, the keyboard maestro, oh so by the way, yes, obviously I've highlighted some of these apps so there's five of them that I've highlighted for specific use cases. The only one that hasn't been highlighted for specific use cases is keyboard maestro and that's because that's what I use for everything else. That's kind of like the backbone of all of the automation. Hazel, TextExpander, Moom are used for specific use cases. Alfred, to be honest, I could live without it. I could just do these things with like the searches and stuff, I could do that with keyboard maestro and Apple's built-in spotlight is pretty robust as it is. And by the way, Alfred does have an add-on package to do automations and things like that as well. I haven't bothered with that. I just have it the sort of base version of it. So the initial sort of paid version but not the upgrade to what do they call it? I think they call it workflows or something like that. I can't quite remember, but I don't use it anyway. That is a much more sort of visual way of doing things. And if you look into the Alfred automation stuff so it's more like sort of blocks and you position them in a line to do different things and you can have it go off and do multiple different things. So I suppose it is a simplified version in some ways of keyboard maestro and it's more sort of visual, I guess, but it's nowhere near as versatile. So I just haven't bothered with it. So yeah, I could probably live without Alfred. Automator, as I say, it is handy to have those things to be able to record the macros. So I do think that that is quite valuable but it is free and it's built into every Mac anyway. The Mac services and the standalone apps, again, I could probably live without that because a lot of those have just got hanging around from when I used it a long time ago. I can't remember the last time that I actually built made a little app in Automator because keyboard maestro is just so much easier for me, personally at this stage. So yeah, keyboard maestro is definitely the one that sort of underpins it all, I guess. So out of all of those, the sort of four that I would think are, I guess, sort of essential and what I'm gonna be building out as part of this video series, I guess, would be those four, keyboard maestro, Hazel, text expander, and also Moom because I think that's just great to be able to set up all of your windows and get into different mind frames for different stages of work or different tasks that you're doing, basically. So that was my slide. I hope you found that useful and it gives a bit more of an overview of how all these things could link together. And obviously you can just use one or none or some or all of them, it's totally up to you. And these do work very well with Stream Deck as well. So I've talked in the last video was how specifically I use a text expander, keyboard maestro together with the Stream Deck as well. So yeah, I'll be expanding out on all of this as well. I nearly did a Tom Buck joke there. Sorry about that. I'll leave the puns to Tom. So that's all for this video. But if you have found this interesting, then leave a message down below in the comments. I do always love to hear those. And if you've got any specific use cases or any other Mac automation apps that I have not left up, I have not got on the list. I know there are others and there's others that I've tried and there are some others that I do use as well, but really those are the core to my sort of productivity system, if you can call it that. So there will be plenty more videos to come. And like I say, I will leave a link to that playlist over on the right hand side. So don't go anywhere. There's plenty more coming up. Have a great day. Until I see you next time.