![]() That the information on how to do all of this was hard to find, could probably be taken as a symptom of this. Maybe then I’ll finally start using a more portable/flexible email/calendar client?Īnd on a similar theme, as I have been reading around Applescript / JXA, those technologies might not be in Apple’s long term plans. I am a bit worried that if I upgrade (forced or otherwise), this functionality will quickly disappear. Fortunately, most agendas are a bit rubbish, and I only need a couple of lines of a LOT of (usually Zoom-related) bumph.Īlso, none of this has been tested on “New” Outlook 365. To get around this, in the short term I replaced them with ` -` text, which I can quickly edit around if/when I find it appropriate. That may be less problematic for more traditional outliners, but a lot of Roam’s power comes from blocks being first-class citizens that stand on their own. I couldn’t find a way in Roam to paste in soft breaks, which leads to agendas pasting in as multiple blocks. This isn’t without some slight flaws, the biggest one is Roam’s (or maybe it’s MacOS’s?) treatments of soft line breaks. I’ve probably overused the sentence a bit in this post, but it was all rather straightforward. Hammerspoon provides hs.osascript.javascript to execute JavaScript, hs.tContents to copy the results of that JS to the clipboard, and hs.hotkey.bind to hook it all up to a keyboard shortcut. You might wonder how bad Lua not being “a strength of mine” could possibly be by looking at the digital “chicken scrawl” that is the chained JavaScript I assembled to do that here.įinally, it was a matter of hooking it all into Hammerspoon. Once I’d accessed those events, I turned them into plain ol’ JSON with the intention of letting Hammerspoon deal with them – before realising that Lua is not a strength of mine – so I continued using JavaScript to transform those objects into Roam-compatible markdown. The trick to enable this is to activate Outlook Calendar’s “list view” ( CMD+CTRL+0), so you can select several meetings without triggering extra UI elements. After about 20 minutes of screwing around, most of what I required could be retrieved using Application("Microsoft Outlook").selectedObjects() (seriously). When researching this, I found several pages about getting information using the frankly-quite-weird AppleScript language, but very few using Apple’s JavaScript for Automation extensions (JXA). I started out by using MacOS’s Script Editor to hack around the Outlook API so I could see what I might query on. Not only that, but it was pretty straightforward. And without wanting to spoil too much, it turns out I could. I decided to see if I could script exporting those meetings to markdown – trying to turn what is a bit of a laboured, several-times-a-day process into a simpler, single keyboard shortcut. When this happens, I both lose the value it provides, and I feel like a bit of a failure – which is never nice. But when you have a day of six or more meetings, filling in those can be tiresome, to the point where I actively avoid doing it (even with TextExpander shortcuts). I find this fantastically useful, the “Attendees” section is particularly good for some of the natural cross-referencing it provides. One of the templates I’ve been using to take personal notes for meetings looks like this: - ] ![]() It has become a vital tool in my day-to-day thinking and planning. But the long and the short of it is that absolutely everything I come across and think about is going in there – personal stuff, work stuff, little snippets of data that might one day be useful to me again. You don’t need me to tell you why you should or shouldn’t be using it, there are enough of us out there already proselytising about this thing. The problemĭuring the summer, I started using Roam Research for all of my note-taking and personal knowledge management. It was a nice exercise in documenting stuff for myself while hopefully putting something out into the ether that might be of use to others. Recently, I posted on here about using Hammerspoon to scratch a personal itch.
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