If you live in America and have a garage, you probably know the name Chamberlain. They dominate the garage door market with their two consumer brands, Chamberlain and LiftMaster. (They own a bunch of related companies, too.)
If you live in America and have a garage and want smart home control of your garage door, you probably already know that Chamberlain is pretty hostile to folks using its openers with HomeKit and other smart home ecosystems.
Elgato recently announced the Stream Deck Pedal, offering yet another way to trigger automation workflows for those of us addicted to using the mouse as little as possible. My buddy Matt has a nice review up on his blog:
The first thing I noticed when the package arrived was how much larger the box was than I was expecting — the Pedal has a 10"x7" footprint and weighs a surprisingly-chunky two pounds, owing in no small part to the rigid steel sheet forming its bottom plate. The rest of the Pedal is made of hardy matte plastic with a pleasant texture on the top surface, so your (hopefully-socked) feet have something grippy to register on. One subtle yet essential design element in an otherwise-uncomplicated three-button pedal is the slight elevation of the left and right pedals over the middle button sandwiched between them — about a quarter-inch of tactile feedback that makes tapping the wrong button pretty difficult to do.
I’m turning 36 early next year, so in attempt to stay relevant with my younger friends, I communicate a lot with GIFs.
I am a big fan of the GIFWrapped app by my buddy Jelly for building my own private collection, but sometimes I want to search for something quickly from my Mac.
I use Alfred as my launcher of choice, so I’ve built two custom workflows to make this Very Important Work easier. I have shared the GIPHY workflow before, but now I have one for Tenor as well.
Love it or hate it, it seems that the Touch Bar is here to stay on the MacBook Pro. As such, it seems wise to me to make it more useful.
A little backstory first, though… earlier this year, David Sparks finally talked me into buying a Stream Deck to use at my desk. As with most things, he was right about how much I would come to love it.
The Stream Deck is incredibly flexible, but one of my most common use cases is to tap a single button on it to open a bunch of related Safari tabs when it comes time to prepare for a show.
For the past several months, I’ve been working on a shortcut designed to be the ultimate assistant for Apple Music. Called MusicBot, the shortcut encompasses dozens of different features and aims to be an all-in-one assistant that helps you listen to music more quickly, generate intelligent mixes based on your tastes, rediscover music from your library, control playback on AirPlay 2 speakers, and much more. I poured hundreds of hours of work into MusicBot, which has gained a permanent spot on my Home screen. Best of all, MusicBot is available to everyone for free.
On this week’s Mac Power Users, Katie and David spoke about subscriptions, including those through the iOS App Store. These can be managed from a central location, but it is buried in the App Store. I made this handy Shortcut to quickly jump right to them.