I was puzzled by the app Automator, and then by the app Shortcuts. In both I saw great potential to automate simple tasks, but I would start building an action, shortcut, you name it, and then I was shortly greeted by the most illogical way of doing things.
For example, I'm studying music theory, so I have two PDFs that my tutor gave me, and I keep going to the folder they are located, opening them, using the app Magnet to send both to the secondary display and then set them side by side.
So I thought, there has to be a way to do this in Shortcuts. First, for some reason, earlier today I couldn't find a way to simply open the PDFs, whether I searched for open, PDF, file, nothing worked. Now it's there as soon as I open the app. So great, one of the things I need is done.
But now I need them both in the secondary monitor, each of them taking one half of the screen. Sounds easy, right? You would think something like this would work:
But NO! You might ask "Why did you set move to coordinates?" Well, because there's no choice to move to the secondary display. Well, there is current display, main display, and the two Samsungs I have listed there. But because the idiots at Samsung set the same serial number in the EDID to all the monitors they make, or at least in batches, I have to set that to monitor 1. And I tried that, but no dice:
All I managed to do over and over is to open the two PDFs, which is a step in the right direction. But I open these every day, several times a day, so I want to automate this with a simple shortcut, as in keyboard shortcut.
So somebody here who knows better than me, please tell me why this is so illogical and doesn't just do what it should do judging by the screenshots you see above?
For example, I'm studying music theory, so I have two PDFs that my tutor gave me, and I keep going to the folder they are located, opening them, using the app Magnet to send both to the secondary display and then set them side by side.
So I thought, there has to be a way to do this in Shortcuts. First, for some reason, earlier today I couldn't find a way to simply open the PDFs, whether I searched for open, PDF, file, nothing worked. Now it's there as soon as I open the app. So great, one of the things I need is done.
But now I need them both in the secondary monitor, each of them taking one half of the screen. Sounds easy, right? You would think something like this would work:
But NO! You might ask "Why did you set move to coordinates?" Well, because there's no choice to move to the secondary display. Well, there is current display, main display, and the two Samsungs I have listed there. But because the idiots at Samsung set the same serial number in the EDID to all the monitors they make, or at least in batches, I have to set that to monitor 1. And I tried that, but no dice:
All I managed to do over and over is to open the two PDFs, which is a step in the right direction. But I open these every day, several times a day, so I want to automate this with a simple shortcut, as in keyboard shortcut.
So somebody here who knows better than me, please tell me why this is so illogical and doesn't just do what it should do judging by the screenshots you see above?