Sometimes the best automation is done for you — Setting and Customizing App Preferences

As I’ve been writing this series, I’ve been writing, taking screenshots, recording gifs, and recording my screen a LOT. My app of choice for screenshots, gifs and simple screen recording is CleanShot X which I get through my SetApp subscription. After the first article in the series, I realized my workflows needed some streamlining. Before I took the automation route, I decided to see if CleanShot X had any preferences that would meet my needs.

My Writing Workflow

For articles I’m going to publish to Medium, I write them in Ulysses which is also a part of the SetApp subscription. I then use the built in option to Publish to Medium. I also copy and paste the markdown version of the article into Obsidian for long term storage.

Ulysses publishes the images and gifs directly to Medium, but I also want them in Obsidian for long term storage.

For the first couple of articles in the series, I was manually saving every image in CleanShot and then moving it to Obsidian. This was tedious and time consuming. I knew I could automate it, but wanted to invoke one of the automation ideas that I’ve been thinking about a lot in this August of Automation — the simplest way to automate is always the best.

In this case, that means checking an apps preferences (in this case, CleanShot X’s preferences) to see if the app lets you customize the particular issue you’re…