I originally posted this on the Keyboard Maestro Forums, and user, JMichael suggested I put this here. This KM macro will help you very quickly add rich notes to a research inventory note. For those of you who don't know about Keyboard Maestro, just know that it's one of the most powerful automation and productivity tools that exists for Mac.
The Situation
I'm a research assistant, which means I do a whole lot of grunt work. Often my professor gives me a book with markups in the bibliography and my job is to go and get them from the library and if they're not there, request them through Interlibrary Loan (ILL). I like to make a detailed list of the books I need so that I can just print it out and take it with me when I make my library run and so I can send an inventory to my prof.
To find the books, I do a search on Melvyl, a worldwide university library catalog. When I find an item, I want to record its vital information in an Evernote note:
The item title
The call number
A link to the listing page for future reference
This obviously means a whole bunch of copy/pasting and window switching, i.e. menial work.
The automation process centers on getting those three points of data onto their own clipboards and pasting them in the desired fashion. The real awesomeness is that it all get's accomplished with a single keystroke! This is possible thanks to @ComplexPoint's help in using the Execute a JavaScript in Google Chromeaction.
The item title and call number each have a unique HTML class, so the script will return the content of the elements with those classes and store them in named clipboard. The macro then does some text cleaning (I'm a formatting freak) and we've got everything we need! I hit the hotkey and end up with:
How Would You Use It?
This is very specific to my own needs, but maybe the process looks familiar to you? This has already saved me a boat load of time and tedium. If you can adapt this to your own workflow, share it!
I realize that parts of this are a bit hacked together, but I don't really know JS (or any scripting language for that matter) so if anyone has any suggestions on streamlining this, let me know!
Idea
Tomulent 1
I originally posted this on the Keyboard Maestro Forums, and user, JMichael suggested I put this here. This KM macro will help you very quickly add rich notes to a research inventory note. For those of you who don't know about Keyboard Maestro, just know that it's one of the most powerful automation and productivity tools that exists for Mac.
The SituationI'm a research assistant, which means I do a whole lot of grunt work. Often my professor gives me a book with markups in the bibliography and my job is to go and get them from the library and if they're not there, request them through Interlibrary Loan (ILL). I like to make a detailed list of the books I need so that I can just print it out and take it with me when I make my library run and so I can send an inventory to my prof.
To find the books, I do a search on Melvyl, a worldwide university library catalog. When I find an item, I want to record its vital information in an Evernote note:
This obviously means a whole bunch of copy/pasting and window switching, i.e. menial work.
The MacroMelvyl Listing to Evernote.kmmacros1 (13.8 KB)
The automation process centers on getting those three points of data onto their own clipboards and pasting them in the desired fashion. The real awesomeness is that it all get's accomplished with a single keystroke! This is possible thanks to @ComplexPoint's help in using the Execute a JavaScript in Google Chromeaction.
The item title and call number each have a unique HTML class, so the script will return the content of the elements with those classes and store them in named clipboard. The macro then does some text cleaning (I'm a formatting freak) and we've got everything we need! I hit the hotkey and end up with:
How Would You Use It?This is very specific to my own needs, but maybe the process looks familiar to you? This has already saved me a boat load of time and tedium. If you can adapt this to your own workflow, share it!
I realize that parts of this are a bit hacked together, but I don't really know JS (or any scripting language for that matter) so if anyone has any suggestions on streamlining this, let me know!
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