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Automator

Another way to open stock charts from mop in Terminal

On Sunday, I posted about my geeky solution to my non-functional Stocks Dashboard widget in Mojave. Then earlier today, I crafted a way to view one of the tracked stock's charts with a mouse click.

A commenter asked if there were any way to view the charts using a built-in tool, as purchasing Keyboard Maestro for just this one task is expensive (and a waste of Keyboard Maestro's capabilities). And in reality, when I first started working on my solution, I started in Automator…but quickly grew frustrated by its inability to do even basic text manipulation.

But then today, I remembered I can use AppleScript in Automator to work with the text, and the solution came together quickly after that: A new Service that appears when you right-click on text in a Terminal window:

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Send URLs to a video download app via Automator

When I find things I enjoy watching on YouTube, sometimes I want to download them—because they may go away, or I may want to watch offline. There are any number of tools out there that will do this for you, including web sites and Mac-specific apps. On the Mac side, I had been using 4K Video Downloader, but recently found VIDL, which had one big advantage for me: It comes with a Safari toolbar icon.

When I see a video I want to keep, I click the VIDL toolbar button, and VIDL launches and downloads the video. (Because it's based on the open source youtube-dl, VIDL supports a lot more sites than does 4K Video Downloader, which is also nice.)

But recently, I noticed that some of the videos I downloaded with VIDL were at 640x360 resolution, even though the source on YouTube was at least 1920x1080. I tried those same URLs in 4K Video Downloader, and I was able to download the full HD versions. There aren't many settings in VIDL, so I didn't see any obvious way to force it to get higher resolution versions1youtube-dl is supposed to get the highest-resolution version automatically, so I switched back to 4K Video Downloader…but I really missed the handy toolbar button.

It's not like it was a lot of work to copy a URL, switch to 4K Video Downloader, and paste, but it was just enough work to get annoying. If I had the skills, writing a basic extension like this for Safari should be pretty simple. But as I don't have the skills, I went looking for another solution, and I found one using Automator:

I created a new Service in Automator that sends URLs to 4K Video Downloader via the contextual menu in Safari's URL bar.

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