October 07, 2014
More Macros! Yesterday I posted »Trello this with Keyboard Maestro« and I submitted a ticket on Brett’s GitHub site asking if it was possible to add a proper multi-line description.
Turns out this already ought to work. Brett fixed it and now it works.
This is brillant since now we can generate Markdown reports from Trello. The possibilities are endless. One can create reports of just one list, of selected lists across different boards, a whole board or your complete Trello account in a flat folder structure with Markdown files.
A next step could be to automatically email these reports to team members or your boss at the end of the week.
However, to get you started I have setup a simple one which creates a Markdown formatted report and saves the file on your Desktop as “name-of-your-list.txt” with the following syntax:
# CARD TITLE (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM)
## 1st Card Title
Description text here
***
## 2nd Card Title
Description text here
Optionally opens the report in Marked.app (enable the corresponding action in the bottom).
This is the macro in action:
In addition, yesterdays macro which generates a numbered list from all card titles in a specific list is now updated to work with Version 0.2.0 of Brett’s Ruby Gem.
UPDATE: I wasn’t exactly crystal clear and some of you guys seem to run into trouble. Here’s the thing. The two macro’s here are “extensions” which depend on the macro’s from the last post. I updated the download package below – everything you need is in there, but make sure to read the instructions from the last post to set it up properly, c.f. without running 00) Trello: Setup Trello API key one time these won’t work. Here’s the new link:
DOWNLOAD
If you need help with any of this or your own Keyboard Maestro workflow just leave a comment or contact me via email.
October 06, 2014
Today I’m publishing my Trello macro for swiftly filing notes or websites to Trello. I’m actually a bit excited about it because it has been really useful so far for me.
If you work in a team and don’t know about Trello, go and check it out now. It shines at collaboration and their iOS app was the first one (that I know of) which implemented drag and drop in a elegant manner. It’s one of those services where you wonder why their free plan is so damn good. If your still not convinced let me play the power card: It has Markdown support.
What The Macro Does?
This Keyboard Maestro Macro will enable you to post to any Trello list on any Trello board by prompting you to select a board and list.
You can drag and drop a note from Finder to the droplet that comes with the macro. The first line will become the title (any Markdown header from # to ###### gets stripped) and the body renders as the description of the card.
Beside the droplet app there is a macro which works the same way, only it acts on a text selection.
Another one will try to guess the active (aka frontmost) browser and takes the title of the active tab as the cards name and puts Source: <URL> in the cards description. Since there’s also a prompt you can change the cards name and description to your liking.
You can cancel the transmission process on every prompt and the macro should fail gracefully, deleting all variables and stopping the rest of the macro from firing unwanted information at Trello.
Lastly, you can also copy a numbered Markdown list into your clipboard of a specific list:
As I tend to write more modular macros recently, you should be fine modifying this to your needs by looking at the existing macros. I also put enough comments inside the macros to explain what happens in each step.
To get you up and running follow all the steps outlined in this post.
Dependencies
Behind the scenes my macro uses Brett Weavnet’s trello_cli. You have to install it via gem install trello_cli in Terminal.app.
Thankfully Brett’s documentation is very detailed and you should be able to accomplish the mission even if you only know ‘the shell’ from Mario Kart or Discworld.
Head over to the GitHub repository and follow his instructions. Here’s the gist of it:
Sign-in to trello.com as the user you want to use for trello_cli.
Get API key (open this link in a web browser):
https://trello.com/1/appKey/generate
The top field contains your Developer API Key. Use it to replace YOUR_API_KEY in the member token links below as well as the TRELLO_DEVELOPER_PUBLIC_KEY environment variable.
Next, get a member token. You will need to replace YOUR_API_KEY in the links below with the API key obtained in the previous step.
…
To get a read / write member token:
https://trello.com/1/authorize?key=YOUR_API_KEY&name=trello-cli&expiration=never&response_type=token&scope=read,write
In case you want to use his Ruby gem on the command line to also do the last step of the instructions on the projects GitHub site, namely “set the api key and member token environment variables”.
If you want to learn more about Token creation and so on, you can pay the official Trello documentation a visit.
DOWNLOAD
UPDATE: This macro now also contains the Markdown export macros from the follow-up post.
NOTE: Check via Terminal.app that your installed trello_cli gem is globally accessible (= accessible form anywhere without cd-ing into the folder where it’s located). The best thing is to symlink it to your /usr/local/bin/ folder.
To put a symlink there:
(1) Go to Terminal.app and type trello. Copy the path of your gem. Example output:
/Users/patrick/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p451/bin/trello
(2) In Terminal.app make the symlink with ln -s source-path target-path. Example input:
ln -s /Users/patrick/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.0.0-p451/bin/trello /usr/local/bin/trello
If you type trello in Terminal.app and get a response you’re good to go.
Attribution
My thanks go to Brett Weavnet (@brettweavnet) for his trello_cli. I build this macro around his Ruby gem, so without it there would be no TRELLO THIS!
GitHub: https://github.com/brettweavnet/trello_cli
In addition, Rob Threw (@complexpoint) isn’t a FoldingText users lifesaver, he has a nifty snippet to make sure your Keyboard Maestro (or Alfred or LaunchBar or Hazel) installation uses the default shell:
Calling the FoldingText Command Line interface from KeyBoard Maestro
It’s way better than what I did before and thanks to it every one of you should have no problems running Brett’s Ruby Hem – so this is what I used in the macro to make trello_cli run properly without exporting additional RVM paths.
The droplet contains 99% of Evan Mullins (@circlecube) “Copy Path script droplet” AppleScript and a tiny bit of Keyboard Maestro to make it work. Oldie but goldie.
Know Issues
Standard Markdown should work just fine, but if your text starts with tons of hyphens there’s a good chance the macro will fail. The macro will convert every list that uses hyphens into an asterisks list, but there could be scenarios, like a text with --------- in it where the whole grummy thing chokes.
In case you find anything else, shoot me a mail.
Links To Other CLI Versions
- blangel/wrk – This looked a bit dated and there are tons of issues with Umlauts; that’s why I dismissed it.
- timcosgrove/trelli – This sounds promising. I haven’t checked it out since there’s no documentation aside from this post by Tim. UPDATE: Tim has abandoned the project.
- mheap/trello-cli – I often write macros with YOU in mind (yep, this is ought to sound creepy), and since getting NPM to run is an extra step I went for the ruby version of Brett, since OS X supports Ruby out of the box. I haven’t installed this one either.
September 15, 2014
Here’s a collection of background images to enhance your productivity. They make Safari 20% faster and help you get things done in a minimal amount of time. Also, I don’t know yet if I can afford to upgrade my 2012 iPhone 5. I could press the buy button, but I most definitely shouldn’t if I want to avoid having to sign-up for a local cage fight match to pay the rent in 3 months time. So, as nice as those wallpapers are… they won’t fit on the iPhone 6’s gigantous display – so take that pre-orderers (♥‿♥).
Three classic Nintendo controllers by Larissa Herbst:
Super cool. I currently rock the Super Famicon on my iPhone’s lock screen.
If you like those, you should probably check out her older wallpaper pack with lots of goodies for TV buffs (The Simpsons, Spiderman, Adventure Time, Pokémon, …).
All of her wallpapers fit the iPad and the iPhone 5.
For the Adventure Time nuts out there, here are three more by Samuel Suarez. He has also a standard Spongebob flavoured and Mike Wazowksi.
Dribbble is always a good place to start looking for wallpapers. Lately I’m into geometric shapes as backgrounds. Sveinn Davidsson has some nice ones:
However, if you prefer gradients check out these two by Yoav Weiss:
Well, and if you combine geometric shapes with gradients you’ll arrive at something like these 3D Block Wallpapers by Matt Helm
Another Dribbble user, Scott Stephens, made ten parallax iPhone wallpapers out of the Spitzer’s Infrared Milky Way pictures.
Shapes and gradients are nice and all, but from time to time I enjoy a beautiful photography on my lock screen. The following collection by Ben “Macintosh” has a set of gorgeous scenic backgrounds for your iPhone… and it reminds me of Bradley Castaneda’s Wallpaper Archive which Shawn Blanc linked to.
You can also follow Ben on Instagram.
Nina Geometrieva has picked her artist name well. She has some nice geometric walls for you, the Meteor Wallpaper…
… and a Sunset Wallpaper:
Honorable mentions:
Lastly, if your constantly on the look for some fresh wallpapers you could install the Bēhance app on your Mac and iDevice.
And if you want to go all flat there’s iOSX7 App Icons by nateblunt from deviantART. His icons brings the flattish iOS7 inspired look to a range of OS X apps.
Enjoy your screen(s).
