Leo的恒河沙

Not just Obsidian, a review of the All-in-One tools I still use, for up to 10 years - Minority#

#Omnivore

Highlights#

MacroDroid ⤴️ ^b872b9ca

Amazing tool!!

Quick Bookkeeping#

I kept track of my expenses from around 2014 to 2017 for three years, and found that my annual spending was quite similar, so I stopped keeping records. I tried various apps, even handwritten notes, but ultimately stopped due to boredom. I believe that a task must have some significance to be sustainable; the longer you persist, the greater the meaning, at least it has value in existence.

The value of bookkeeping now lies in distinguishing personal expenses from those on social media, while also viewing it as big data about myself, extracting insights to enhance resilience.

The bookkeeping function mainly utilizes the macro "ID_ Find ID" in the shared template, expanding on that to perform recognition operations, writing related content for WeChat, Alipay, and Pinduoduo, and also reading Taobao-related content from Alipay.

There are two methods for bookkeeping:

1. Reading the notification bar: By reading the notification bar information that pops up after a successful payment, bookkeeping is achieved. It's quite intelligent, but MacroDroid itself has bugs and often fails to read notifications; not all WeChat payment channels pop up notifications, making it suitable only for simple records.
2. Active screen reading: Open the Alipay or WeChat bookkeeping app to directly read payment details from the ledger. Each time a payment is made, if the notification bar method fails to record it, I will open the payment details in the bookkeeping app, directly read the detailed information, and write it into Markor's QuickNote.

Opening the bookkeeping app after each payment can be a painful operation, but thinking of it as "using fragmented time to handle trivial matters" makes it more bearable. ⤴️ ^1b5beef3

This is incredibly practical; I need to try it.

Tencent QL and Jiji Cloud ⤴️ ^eb349c6e

Low-code platforms are the trend; I will study them gradually, similar to Power Automate.

Not just Obsidian, a review of the All-in-One tools I still use, for up to 10 years.

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The more features a software tool has that meet essential needs, the stronger the dependency on it, leading to longer usage time and higher frequency of use. This time, I will review the software tools that I have been using consistently and will continue to use for a long time. The longest one has been around for nearly 10 years, showing no signs of being phased out.

Why do we need All-in-One?

I am the host of “Orange Cat in Film”, with an IT background and limited technical skills, only 7 years, and I am also a new media director. With these dual identities, knowledge requires both breadth and depth, involving both team and individual work. The complexity of tasks and the urgency of time made me realize the importance of optimizing workflows. In this exploratory process, I rely on many excellent software tools, and their All-in-One attributes become very important.

The problems that All-in-One can solve ultimately aim to reduce the energy consumption caused by "switching," making searching, maintaining, and summarizing tasks simpler and more straightforward.

In the past two years, my favorite tool has undoubtedly been Obsidian. For detailed uses, see:

During use, I continuously adjust my notes according to my workflow, and this time it is more about supplementing some new uses, mainly relying on the plugin Custom Frame.

Official Introduction:

An Obsidian plugin that turns web apps into panes using iframes with custom styling. Also comes with presets for Google Keep, Todoist, and more.

The function is simple: it opens a custom webpage in Obsidian without needing to switch to a browser. I mainly use it for Trello, Notion-like, Alist, Grafana, and PhotoPrism.

Uses of Custom Frames#

Trello: Team collaboration.

In the past six months, I have focused on team collaboration issues, collecting and optimizing data related to video production cycles and the time spent on each stage. After some exploration, I incorporated Trello's powerful features and free usage into the Custom Frames plugin. Compared to Ob's KanBan plugin, Trello is more team-oriented, with its built-in Power-Up (plugins) and Automation Button features being very powerful, easily achieving time tracking, cost statistics, and webhook connectivity with Feishu.

Alist: Cloud storage aggregation, making it convenient to consolidate my Baidu, Alibaba Cloud object storage, and foreign cloud storage. After installing Alist on my computer, I configured the documents to work with Alist, using localhost + port settings to open it from Obsidian.

I had installed Alist months ago, but its usage rate was extremely low; I was indeed too lazy to open it. However, after embedding it in Obsidian, I started frequently sourcing materials from it, which became convenient and quick. The downside is that Alist needs to be installed on every computer because it relies on local installation, unlike Trello which depends on the web.

Notion/Flowus: Notion and Notion-like. Initially, I used Notion for team collaboration, but having the server overseas was really troublesome; it would frequently have issues several times a month, greatly affecting the experience. Utilizing its API functionality, I now use it more for data storage and backup, making it easier to view. Flowus is more for my photography paid courses, providing a unified management of related materials compared to Baidu Cloud. Accessing Flowus from within China is also much better than Notion, but its functionality is indeed weaker.

Grafana: Deployed on a VPS, serving as a digital dashboard for the team, embedding it in Obsidian makes data viewing more convenient. It also involves database operations, which I won't elaborate on, as it requires high hands-on skills.

PhotoPrism: Deployed on my Ugreen NAS, mainly used for photo albums, finding photography works, and as teaching materials, focusing on convenience and speed, without needing to open image software!

Benefits of All-in-One#

I am accustomed to evaluating the improvements brought by these All-in-One software, assessing how much optimization they bring to workflows and why they increase usage rates, etc.

Taking Flowus as an example:

For web-based tools like Trello:

These optimizations do not yield much time savings; they are more about reducing the number of choices made, thus decreasing energy consumption. It is said that the average adult makes about 35,000 choices a day, and every little thing is a choice that can become the last straw.

Ease of Use: ⭐⭐

The plugin itself is not difficult; the challenge lies in the embedded content. For example, Trello and Notion, the difficulty is in learning to use them.

MacroDroid#

Since Obsidian became applicable across all platforms, my work has increasingly involved mobile operations, leading to a surge in usage frequency and the idea of "turning my phone into a productivity tool," rather than solely relying on a PC as the primary productivity device. After all, the time spent on mobile devices far exceeds that on PCs, and they are more portable. The tool that helped me realize this idea began with MacroDroid. Functionally, MacroDroid can be seen as a combination of IFTTT, HTTP shortcuts, notification filters, etc., essentially an All-in-One.

Official Introduction:

Make your phone truly smart with the number one automation app on Android.

Other similar tools include Automation and Task, but they don't inspire the desire to learn.

When I first encountered MacroDroid, I was immediately attracted; I could understand all the functional sections at once, and while the details required exploration, it felt very much like smart home management, except the operational target is the phone itself. At least it wasn't starting from a completely unfamiliar field; the high integration allows for zero coding. Learning knowledge begins with familiar concepts, transitioning to unfamiliar areas, and then learning new fields, making it psychologically easier to accept.

The basic principle of MacroDroid is "what situation triggers what behavior."

Time Tracking#

The most basic use is commuting time tracking. With MacroDroid, recording is quite simple; timing starts when leaving home Wi-Fi and ends when connecting to the company's Wi-Fi, all done automatically. You can use MacroDroid's built-in timer or combine it with its plugin functionality to connect to aTimeLogger or TimeMeter, etc. Currently, I record the time I leave and arrive, while also starting and stopping aTimerLogger for easy viewing.

Similarly, I am also doing:

• Using the notification bar to record NFC bus check-in times.
• Using the notification bar to record Meituan bike riding times.
• Manually recording special non-routine behaviors.

Most of the records for routine events only require determining the trigger conditions, with all data written to local files, ultimately summarized in Obsidian to complete the loop.

Writing to local files is done in conjunction with Markor's QuickNote.md, which allows for faster writing, opening, and editing compared to Obsidian; I also use Markor for daily editing of md files.

Quick Bookkeeping#

I kept track of my expenses from around 2014 to 2017 for three years, and found that my annual spending was quite similar, so I stopped keeping records. I tried various apps, even handwritten notes, but ultimately stopped due to boredom. I believe that a task must have some significance to be sustainable; the longer you persist, the greater the meaning, at least it has value in existence.

The value of bookkeeping now lies in distinguishing personal expenses from those on social media, while also viewing it as big data about myself, extracting insights to enhance resilience.

The bookkeeping function mainly utilizes the macro "ID_ Find ID" in the shared template, expanding on that to perform recognition operations, writing related content for WeChat, Alipay, and Pinduoduo, and also reading Taobao-related content from Alipay.

There are two methods for bookkeeping:

1. Reading the notification bar: By reading the notification bar information that pops up after a successful payment, bookkeeping is achieved. It's quite intelligent, but MacroDroid itself has bugs and often fails to read notifications; not all WeChat payment channels pop up notifications, making it suitable only for simple records.
2. Active screen reading: Open the Alipay or WeChat bookkeeping app to directly read payment details from the ledger. Each time a payment is made, if the notification bar method fails to record it, I will open the payment details in the bookkeeping app, directly read the detailed information, and write it into Markor's QuickNote.

Opening the bookkeeping app after each payment can be a painful operation, but thinking of it as "using fragmented time to handle trivial matters" makes it more bearable.

Operational Process

Device Control#

Some daily habits can be automated to reduce operational steps.

• Automatically copy verification codes: There are ready-made templates that I modified, using a bowl warning and Bark to forward to others, achieving automation and avoiding repeated inquiries about verification codes in the team.
• Automatically open commonly used music apps when connecting to Bluetooth headphones.
• Voice prompt when fully charged, recording charging times, etc.
• Automatically clear notifications when the screen is turned off.

Benefits of All-in-One#

Automatically recording, manually organizing, and finally summarizing in Obsidian reduces the number of times fingers click on the screen, eliminating the need to remember many things. I hope this is useful to you.

Ease of Use: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The learning curve is quite steep; even trying to explain how to use it feels a bit challenging. I recommend starting with the simplest functions, such as clearing notifications when the screen is off, voice prompts when fully charged, and many other functions in the templates. Learning from existing features is much more efficient than starting from scratch.

If you want to learn management but lack opportunities, then managing yourself is an opportunity, as everyone is walking big data, feeling its complexity and tediousness, and solving it.

The macros I mentioned earlier from MacroDroid have all been exported; you can download and import (the free version of MacroDroid can only use 5 macros).

Sublime Text#

Sublime and Evernote were both adopted around the same year, and it has been 10 years now. At that time, I was attracted by its ability to automatically save on power loss on Windows, from Win7 to Win11 and Mac. Evernote has been replaced, but Sublime remains essential software on every computer.

The official summary of Sublime is:

Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup, and prose. You'll love the slick user interface, extraordinary features, and amazing performance.

Compared to IDEs like VScode and Pycharm, Sublime is a text editor that meets most text work needs and lightweight Python usage. It starts quickly, looks good, is cross-platform, and has a comfortable sidebar, making it a replacement for TXT-like software. Its quick startup is the main reason I use it frequently; "speed is the ultimate skill."

Installation Steps#

I recently bought a Mac mini and noted the installation process for reference:

1. Download the Python installation package from https://www.python.org/downloads/macos/
2. After installation, confirm in the terminal window: python3 or Python3 version
3. Install pip in the terminal window: python3 -m ensurepip --default-pip
4. Confirm successful installation in the terminal window: pip3 --version
5. Install Sublime
6. Open Sublime and select Tools - Build System - Python, View - Syntax - Python to display Python correctly.
7. Create a new test.py file in Sublime and input the following code, then execute with Ctrl/Cmd+B:

import sys

print ("Python Version {}".format(str(sys.version).replace('\n', '')))

Text Work#

Sublime Text has rich features, including multi-column display, file comparison, counting selected words and lines, high-quality color themes, regex search and replace (searching for \n selects all newline characters), and batch processing with multiple files and cursors.
Before using it in Obsidian, I wrote most of my drafts in Sublime and then moved them to the note-taking software. As an enhanced text tool, it is now mainly used for:

• Batch modifying and replacing md content.
• Opening special format system texts, such as .config files.
• Temporarily recording information.
• Some simple draft texts, serving as a "cache."

It has many shortcuts, but I can only remember a few:

• Multi-select lines: Ctrl+A > Ctrl+Shift+L > Home
• Multi-cursor: Ctrl+Mouse Click
• After searching: Alt+Enter to select all search results.

Code Work#

If you want to self-learn Python but are not in a coding job, it will be the best choice.

Currently, I mainly use it to run Python. My Python learning is based on Sublime. Since 2018, I have been making videos in my spare time, and I found that this process was filled with a lot of repetitive and regular operations. Later, I learned that non-linear editing software like Pr, FCPX, and DaVinci can export XML, which can be processed by most programming languages. This opportunity sparked my interest in learning Python. From this point on, Sublime began to be used for coding tasks, no longer just an enhanced TXT or code viewer. Some of the auxiliary functions I developed for video production include:

• Synchronizing the timing of images and videos, addressing the synchronization issue between photography and video. I previously released a video on this, but due to time constraints, the shared version may no longer be functional.
• Reading image Exif information to generate subtitle files.
• Converting subtitle formats and processing translations in multiple languages. Converting txt to srt, srt to txt, etc., many ready-made solutions are available online.
• Automatically trimming silent parts of video and audio. This seems to be a feature introduced by Jianying this year, but I had implemented it back in 2018 without any practical use, and it hasn't been used much since. Even now, Jianying doesn't provide practical utility for me.

These functions save at least 30-50 minutes of production time for each video. Later, when I started operations, I also relied heavily on Python tools for assistance, such as webhook, Notion API, etc.

Plugin Extensions#

An excellent tool is often accompanied by a plugin system.
Here are some of the plugins I frequently use to reduce my switching frequency. When needs increase, using plugins to meet them is also a great feature.

• Package Control: Plugin assistance.
• A file icon: Adds icons to your files; aesthetics equal productivity.
• Markdown editing: Assists in displaying md format.
• Terminus: Integrates the system terminal into the software, commonly used for maintaining the Hexo blog system.
• SFTP: Used for accessing VPS.
• colorPick: A color picker, simply to avoid finding additional software.
• insert num: Inserts numbers, automatically serializing during multi-line cursor usage.

Sublime also has many markdown-related plugins, but they are unnecessary; Typora or Obsidian are better. I built my Hexo blog using VSCode, but for daily maintenance, I directly use Sublime for convenience and speed.

Benefits of All-in-One#

For those who need to code and write copy, the All-in-One benefits are very high. If you often don't need to write code, there's no need to learn, or you can just use it as a txt reader. I've seen suggestions to learn Python to optimize your work, but compared to the learning cost, if you're not interested, I wouldn't recommend it. It's okay to be less efficient. Learning a language is inherently challenging, and the subsequent maintenance and troubleshooting during development can consume a lot of energy.

Ease of Use: ⭐⭐

The software itself is not difficult; the challenge lies in learning Python and regular expressions, but simple batch search and replace tasks are generally straightforward.

Tencent QL and Jiji Cloud#

If your company does not care about internal process issues, and the software spans a wide range with complex processes, you might want to look into Hiflow Tencent QL and Jiji Cloud, two low-code or no-code platforms that allow many software applications to interconnect, including Feishu, Qiw WeChat, Kingdee Cloud, Notion, Douyin, and many others for you to explore.

Tencent QL Hiflow:

Quickly automate repetitive daily tasks to improve work efficiency and achieve more with less. The drag-and-drop graphical process editing interface easily automates connections between SaaS, enterprise applications, data, and cloud services, creating an efficient, stable, and secure integration platform.

Jiji Cloud:

Automating business processes can save enterprises thousands of hours of labor costs without code development, simple and quick, usable by everyone, automatically connecting internal and external enterprise data to build automated business processes.

They are the domestic versions of Zapier. Initially, I considered using Sublime to write Python to create Notion API-like functionalities, but after learning about these automation tools, I decisively abandoned my own coding ideas, mainly considering the maintenance would be too exhausting.

The difference in the free version is that Hiflow limits software, while Jiji Cloud has very few usage times. I use both, with most on Jiji Cloud due to the lack of software restrictions, while webhook on Hiflow is a paid feature.

I have built a webhook-based notification system using them, allowing both teams and individuals to receive scheduled push notifications. It can also be actively pushed through MacroDroid and Trello, and when updating the server's database with Python, notifications will be sent, while data is backed up to Notion.

• Active notifications: MacroDroid (Webhook feature), Trello (Automation Button).
• Receiving notifications: Android (Bowl Warning), iOS (Bark), Feishu (Robot).
• Jiji Cloud: Centralized processing for easy modifications. After updating data to VPS, Jiji Cloud automatically backs it up to Notion.

Many companies have processes that span multiple software applications, and using cloud tools to bridge them is a great efficient choice.

Benefits of All-in-One#

No need to purchase servers or maintain them yourself; if it has the features you need, it significantly boosts efficiency.

Ease of Use: ⭐⭐

After learning MacroDroid, looking at this seems very simple; their design logic is similar. Initially, I used MacroDroid on my phone as a server, as it also runs 24/7, but for standardization, I later removed it and moved to cloud tools when possible.

Conclusion#

All-in-One tools share a common characteristic: they have a plugin system, covering a wide range of needs while also integrating with other software tools to simplify processes. In practice, I found that All-in-One software tools can interconnect, forming a closed loop that creates more value while making tasks simpler. Whether it's Obsidian, MacroDroid, Sublime Text, Tencent QL, or Jiji Cloud, the outputs they create ultimately summarize back into Obsidian for review and reflection, achieving All-in-One.

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