hazel

Read Cult of Mac’s latest posts on hazel:

How to automatically save iMessage pictures to the iPhone Photos app

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save iMessage pictures
Easily save lots of iMessage pictures and movies all at once.
Photo: Cult of Mac

You can’t yet automatically save incoming photos and videos from the Messages app in iOS, but there is a way to quickly select a whole bunch of iMessage pictures and movies, and save them all to your Camera Roll.

Why would you want to do this? The main reason is search. Once your media gets inside the Photos app, it can be searched and included in Memories. Plus, all the pictures of people will get scanned and recognized. In short, right now some of your most valued pictures don’t show up in the place you keep all your pictures. Let’s change that.

How to set up a foolproof note-taking system for writers and other nerds (Part 2)

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Welcome to Part 2 of our series on note-taking for writers (or anyone who takes lots of notes). In three posts we’re looking at ways to take notes on paper, on your iPhone or Mac, and collected from the web, and combine them all (optionally) into Evernote for easy browsing and retrieval. In theory you can do all of this just by launching Evernote, but that app is pretty terrible at capturing notes.

Part 1 dealt with paper notes. This part is all about grabbing quick text notes on your iPhone and Mac, and then using Hazel to send them to Evernote. Have fun!

This Neat Tricks Automatically Creates Day One Entries With IFTTT And Hazel

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This very clever trick from Poor Signal lets you add anything you like to your Mac’s Day One journal app using IFTTT (It This Then That), Hazel and – of course – Day one. And becasue Day One syncs with your iPad, it’s available there, too.

What can you do with this? You could automatically add all your Instagram photos to your journal, pipe in a weather forecast (although Day One does that by itself these days), items from an RSS feed, your heart rate (via Withings’s IFTTT channel), or anything else.

Auto OCR Any PDF On Your Mac With Hazel And Some Clever Tricks

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Maybe you scan all your receipts and bills, and toss the paper into the recycling bin. Congratulations! You’re paperless. You’re also out of luck when it comes to actually finding any of those scans when you need them. You’ll be stuck flipping through stacks of PDFs as if they were stacks of paper.

Unless you get your Mac to automatically run OCR on those scans, making their text searchable. And then maybe you could have you Mac file them for you too, just like computers were supposed to do for us all along.

Sound good? Then check out this neat tutorial from Mac Power Users’ Katie Floyd, which uses Applescript, PDFPen and Hazel to do it all for you.

Hazel 3.2 Adds Mavericks Tags Support

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This one cleans up the desktop, but avoids tagged files, letting you keep them around until you remove the tag.
This one cleans up the desktop, but avoids tagged files, letting you keep them around until you remove the tag.

Hazel users who have already installed OS X Mavericks have reason to be cheerful today: An update to the app brings support for Mavericks Finder tags, letting you do all kinds of neat things with your files, automatically based on how you tag them.

Get Your iTunes Ready For School With Tunes Cleaner #BackToSchool [Deals]

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This is #BackToSchool week at Cult of Mac Deals. There will be several new deals launching each day. Check in here each day for new deals for #BackToSchool. There will be a ton of apps, gear, gadgets, games, and more to buy just in time for the start of school, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for deals that have school — and savings — in mind.

The last thing you want when you get back to school is to wade through tons of digital clutter. Not only does it slow you down, but it can slow your Mac down if you’ve maxed out its internal drive with music, photos, and documents.

So before you hit the books again, breathe some new life into your Mac by cleaning out your Mac and claiming back some of that much-needed space on your drive. Here are some of the areas you should focus just a little bit of time on so that you can return to school with a cleaner, more organized Mac.

Great Alternatives To iPhoto [Feature]

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I’m not going to list all the problems with Apple’s iPhotos for OS X. I’ll just say that it’s clunky, slow, the library bloats as fast as a mob informer that’s been dumped in the Hudson, Photo Stream doesn’t work reliably and – every frikkin time I switch back to the app – it flips to the “Last Import” section in the source list. So I set out to find an alternative. This article will tell you all about my final choice – called Pixa – and a little bit about the alternatives.

Remote Control Your Mac At Home Using Only An iOS Text Editor [How-To]

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Wouldn’t it be neat if you could type “Hey MacBook, STFU!” into your iPhone’s text editor and – mere moments later – have your Mac do just that? Welcome to the nerdy world of automation, where you can remote control not just your computer but your whole home, just using plain text.

With a few simple tools you can control iTunes, turn your bedroom lights down low, and… well, you get the drift. And who said nerds weren’t sexy?

Use IFTTT To Add Instagram, Faebook And Flickr Photos To Your Day One Journal

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Brett Terpstra's scripts will write your journal for you.
Brett Terpstra's scripts will write your journal for you.

With an update last week, iOS and Mac diary app Day One went from a tool for angst-mongering teens to full-fledged journal, adding support for photos (the original was pretty much text-only) and locations, and the ability to automatically pull in weather info.

But for serial hacker and tweaker Brett Terpstra, maker of the amazing Markdown preview app Marked, among many, many other things, this still wasn’t enough. So Brett wrote a tool called Slogger, which pulls in posts from your existing social networks and adds them to your Day One journal, rendering any text in Markdown, naturally.

How To Get New TV Shows On Your iPad, Automatically [How-To]

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This is what you're competing with when you comet with free

This is an article about using BitTorrent with other OS X apps to automate the downloading and converting of TV shows, adding metadata and then transferring them to your iPad to be watched. Some of you will rage that this is immoral, illegal (in your country) or both. Others will say that BitTorrent is, like, totally legit and is used every day for, like, downloading Linux builds, man.

I don’t care. What I do care about is watching TV Shows on my iPad, complete with subtitles, metadata, cover art and converted into a format that won’t kill the battery whilst playing back. I would buy these from the iTunes Store if I could, but as I live in Spain, I can’t. Here’s how to do it yourself.