You would think there was a built-in macro recorder on Mac for this sort of thing, but that's not the case. A real human is still required to provide personal information to authenticate to the website and get to the location selection screen. It is only to automate a small repetitive sequence that is otherwise painful to execute over and over. The automation solution described in this post is not a bot that scoops up concert tickets or causes other such mischief by impersonating human users. In this case, I wasn't seeking to replace the entire workflow, only this small repetitive sequence that was causing wrist strain. That's why seeking out automation solutions to replace repetitive tasks is so important. This is something to watch out for if you type for a living, a repetitive strain injury can put a serious dent in your career. However, after several more minutes of refreshing via keyboard, both my wrists started to ache.

Down Arrow to select the next option, if current selection was last in the list, this would circle around to the first selection.

Tab to move the focus to the next selection within the open dropdown.

Fortunately the dropdown was keyboard accessible, and could be manipulated with the following key sequence: However, after a few minutes of this, my right wrist (mouse hand) began to ache. For example, 10km away, 20km away, etc.Īt first I was using the mouse to do this which involved one click on the dropdown control to open it, and another click on any option other than the currently selected one.

The only way to force a refresh on the current page was to select a different value from a dropdown that had values for number of kilometers away for the location data being displayed. However, pressing the browser refresh button or keyboard shortcut for refresh triggered navigation to the previous page rather than refreshing the current data.

This website required constantly refreshing, as in every second, to get up to date data. I recently found myself having to use a website to perform a critical task.

But first, a little background on how I came to be solving this particular problem. This post will explain how to automate a series of key sequences on a Mac and assign a keyboard shortcut to play the entire sequence.

What is automator mac app