Jack Wellborn on Using Automation to Make Computers Personal

Making Computers Personal – Worms and Viruses

Personal computers have become easier and more accessible, to the point where they and their apps are necessarily built for everyone. That’s truly great, but being easy and more accessible doesn’t make them personal. It makes them general purpose. Personal automation gives individuals the power to make their general purpose computer that was built for everyone actually personal.

Jack links to a few automations that he has shared via GitHub, but as he points out, you don’t necessarily need to reach for AppleScript or third-party utilities to get started — macOS can do some of the heavy working for you, if you know where to look.

I’ve used a combination of keyboard shortcut (re)mappings and tools such as Hazel and Keyboard Maestro to make my Mac do a lot of digital housekeeping work for me and reduce the number of key presses I need to use to get things done.