One of the central improvements that computers bring to us is the ability to automate repetitive tasks. As a school psychologist, I did a lot of cobbling together applescripts and templates using merge features to automate some of my writing of reports, and to reduce the likelihood of mistakes. TextExpander similarly helped me with the massive writing burden of the job as well.

My job as a manager requires much less repetitive writing, although I still rely on a text expansion utility (currently Typinator) for a lot of repetitive writing (phone numbers, addresses, and some other things),

Writing here at Uncorrected, though, introduces some repetitive tasks that I sought to address using Shortcuts, and most recently, the support for Quick Actions in macOS Tahoe.

Rename Photos for Blog Posts

One of the coolest new features that employs AI that’s baked into macOS is harnessing the power of Private Cloud Compute. Entirely inspired by Jason Snell’s post on Six Colors, I put this shortcut together to use Private Cloud Compute to rename screenshots and photos I intend to post based on a description of the photo. Is it hard to rename a file so that the file name matches the content? Not really. But it can be repetitive. This one is specific to my Sunday Serial series, and it appends the date to the graphic asset, which is a practice I’ve been applying for a while now.

Update: this was a helpful video, too.