Hello, and welcome to the live stream. Today we are talking about Stream Deck, and it's basically going to be a complete setup tutorial. So start to finish looking at the different models of Stream Deck, and then also how to get it set up right from the beginning, basically, because a lot of people get Stream Deck with an idea in mind of how they're going to use it. This would be the case with me when I thought I was going to just be using it for switching scenes in e-cam for recording videos. And then often what happens is when you get it, you realize that there are so many other uses that you could potentially have for it. And so just spending a bit of time sort of thinking about how to get it set up correctly from the beginning is going to save you a few headaches further down the line. And again, I'm talking from experience here because I went down a particular path of setting it up in a certain way, and then ended up having to sort of start from scratch again. So I'll talk about that. That's all related to folders and profiles, but getting a little bit of a head of myself there. But we'll also have a look at the different models as well. And I'll talk about my recommendations in terms of which Stream Deck is best and which one you should get. Obviously, there are budgetary constraints, but there are some different models. And I've got a few thoughts on that as well. So I think this was dropped in during the trailer, but just quick say hello to Dan. And great to see you've checked in, even if it was maybe a couple of hours ago. But this has all been inspired really, this video, is Dan was chatting in the Discord, just somebody new to Stream Deck. And so this is kind of what's prompted me to do this video. I have got other videos on the site all about Stream Deck, and indeed I've got a whole playlist of Beginner's Guide to Stream Deck, but things certainly have changed a little bit since I made those videos. So as I say, I thought it'd be good to just do a complete run through. So first of all, what is Stream Deck then for the totally uninitiated? I suspect that most of the viewers of my channel know what Stream Deck is. Most of my traffic for the channel is driven by people searching for Stream Deck, and it's my Stream Deck videos that are most popular. But in any case, just in case you are completely new and not sure what the Stream Deck is, it's this little device here, and it is essentially a keyboard. It's really so much more than a keyboard, so it can do lots of other things, but essentially it is just a series of different keys. And as I say, there are different models, which we'll look at. But one thing that is kind of unique about this is that all of these little keys are in fact individual screens. So you can see, in fact, let me come to this view. This might be a little bit easier, not that one. This one. These individual keys here are physical keys that you can push down, unlike a similar device, which is the Loop Deck, which has a touch screen. But the keys on this Stream Deck are all, as I say, physical keys, but each one has a little screen on them, which means that you can change the icons that are on them and change the symbols. And that's how you can tell exactly what functions they are doing. If I come out to this particular view here, so this is the profile that I've got for controlling this live stream. And so all the different scenes switching I can do from here. I can do various other different things, but it's not just for live streaming. And although it was a tool that was created originally for live streamers, hence the name Stream Deck, created for live streamers by live streamers, it is actually really a powerful productivity tool. And although I bought it with recording videos in mind, the primary use I have for it these days is actually just for general productivity throughout the day when I'm not either recording or live streaming. So we'll be having a look at some of that a little bit later in terms of all the different things that you can do with it outside of just switching scenes and stuff like that. So let's have a little look at the different models. This is the XL that I was just showing you. So let me just come back to here. It does sort of sit flat on the desk like that, but it also has this magnetic stand that just simply clips onto the back to have it as more of an elevated angle to it. So generally with a keyboard, you probably used to just touch typing like this. And although you can kind of feel your way around the Stream Deck because they do have these raised keys, it is nice to have it sort of tilted towards you so you can actually see what all of the buttons are doing. So that is the XL. Now that has 32 keys. There are some other models though. So let's just take a quick look at the different models that there are in the range. So we've got the Stream Deck XL, which is the one I've just shown you. The original one was actually 15 keys and it doesn't have the raised back on it. It does come with a sort of rather flimsy kickstand that you can sort of sit on top of, but it's not as sort of built in as the Stream Deck XL. The Stream Deck original one, as I say, was the first one to come out. They then released the Stream Deck XL a couple of years later and with it, they also released the Stream Deck Mini, which is basically six keys. Then at some point last year it was, they basically refreshed the original one to bring it more in line with the design of the XL and with the Mini. And so that one has got 15 keys as well, but it has that sort of fixed base. So just having a quick look in more detail, this is what the XL looks like. And by the way, the cables on these are USB-C that plug into the back of the device and then a regular USB-3 that would plug into your computer. If you have got a USB-C to USB-C cable, you can also just sort of replace that yourself because it does have a detachable cable. In fact, that's another thing that is a differentiator between the XL, the 15 key Mark II, and the six key versus the original 15 key. That one had a sort of fixed cable that you couldn't change. So this then is the original one. And if I scroll down, it might be able to see the stand. You can still get the original 15 key and it's obviously a little bit cheaper than the other one. So there you can see that stand that I was talking about. It's very much a bit of an afterthought. From a design point of view, it's not the greatest and certainly doesn't look as sleek as the new Mark II, which is the 15 key Mark II, which also has one additional feature that isn't on the 32 key XL or the six key Mini, which is that this one has a sort of magnetic face plate so that you can actually change the cover on it to give you some different colors and different designs on the front. And that just sort of snaps on with a magnet as well. And then the Mini that I mentioned, here you go, just the little ditty one. It's just two keys tall by three wide, so a little six key one there. And there is also one other model of Stream Deck, which is a very different inform factor. And that's one that I've got under my desk right now. And that is the Stream Deck pedal. So all the things that I'm showing you that we're going to be able to do with the Stream Deck on the desk, you can also do not just with the touch of a finger on a button, but you can also do it with your feet as well. So in fact, this switching scenes is what I'm doing actually with the pedal. So those are the different models. And really, as I say, apart from the pedal being, obviously, just on the floor, the others are exactly the same functionality it's just coming down to how many buttons that you actually have with the device. As opposed to something like the Loop Deck, which I've covered on the channel before, where all of the models have actually got some very differentiating features between them all. So that's something that's just Stream Deck.  And so I'll talk about that a little bit later because which model is going to be the right one for you is going to depend on what you want to do with it, obviously. But the little caveat with that is whatever you think you want to do with it, you might find that you end up doing a lot more. And in fact, a lot of people who end up buying the 15 key usually is not too long before they've got their eyes on the 32 key when they fill up all of the available slots. But don't worry about only having 15 keys because you can actually add in multiple pages and we'll look at profiles as well a little bit later. So you don't really just have that few keys. There are actually potentially hundreds of different things that you can assign to these things. So that's obviously what we'll be digging into today as well is looking at how to go through and program all of that. So as I say, it is basically a keyboard. That's what it is. And you can do anything you can do with a regular keyboard but actually you can do so much more because basically all of these little buttons you can use to trigger a whole series of actions, not just necessarily one thing. So it really opens it up as a powerful productivity tool. So why would you use something like this over just keyboard shortcuts if you can trigger all these things on your keyboard? Well, one thing that I found was keyboard shortcuts are fine if I'm typing and I'm typing lots of text and I've got both hands on the keyboard then it's very easy to sort of reach across to all of the different keys. But if you've got one hand on the mouse suddenly keyboard shortcuts become difficult unless they're all over on one side of the keyboard because you've obviously got to try and reach across to them. So actually having the stream deck as an accompaniment to a, you know, when you're working with a mouse means that you can sort of really fly around documents or spreadsheets or whatever it is that you happen to be doing. And in fact, in a sort of previous life a few years ago my sort of regular full-time day-to-day thing was as an architect and so I was quite used to manipulating 3D models on the computer there and then I would generally have sort of one hand on the mouse on this side and then the other hand would be on what we call 3D mouse so it's basically for manipulating computer CAD models in all directions and so I was used to basically just being able to design a house with my hand on these two separate devices and so actually the stream deck really sort of replaced that in some other things that I've been doing more recently where I tend to be sort of sat with one hand on the mouse and one sort of poised close to the stream deck and it really makes it easy to as I say just trigger all of these things. Hey Dina, just popping in, say hello, great to see you here. So that is the models. Now in terms of the the build quality it's pretty solid really. I mean it's, I have had this stream deck excel now for over a year maybe 18 months something like that and yeah I've never never felt that there's any issue with build quality. Same goes for the loop deck really which is a similar device I'm not necessarily talking about that today but you know they've got this really solid solid feel to them. There's a real weight to it as well and with the excel it's got this kind of on the magnetic base it's got a sort of rubbery bottom to it so it certainly stays where it's put and you know it's just got a real sort of heft to it if you like. It certainly means that it's not entirely portable whereas something like the loop deck I find is very easy to just sort of throw into a case or something or a bag whereas the stream deck is definitely a desktop device. I wouldn't necessarily want to be carting this round with me anywhere. However that said it's probably a good time to mention that there is in fact, and in fact look at that the loop decks just switched off just when I was talking about it. I must have hurt its feelings. The stream deck as well as the hardware devices there is also a mobile application so it's actually a great way to try out the stream deck in terms of the functionality because with the mobile app there is a free trial of it if you search in the app store search for stream deck you can find the app. There's a free trial of it and then after that it's think it's three dollars a month something like that. Hey Wayne just popping in as well great to see you here Wayne. If you get the free trial of it then it's three dollars a month thereafter to continue with the sort of subscription of it and basically with the mobile app you get 15 keys that just appears on your iPhone or iPad or Android device or whatever it happens to be. So you might not necessarily want to continue with the subscription but getting the free trial is a great way as I say just to try out the different actions that you can do and the different things that you can do with it. So for me that's the route I went. I tried the mobile app first of all and I think I was using it for about a day or two maximum before I ended up just ordering the actual device because it really does sort of allow you to test out the software and see all of the different things that it can do. So really solid device those are the different devices so let's get on into looking into how you go about actually programming it. Now before I do that though I just want to mention that this is actually a kind of rerun if you like of a live stream that I did on Amazon because I do stream every week to Amazon and I do something on a couple of times actually but I do something called the Sunday session it is at Sunday 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time you can find me on Amazon at takeonetech.live and there you will be able to get a I'll just drop that into the chat. There you'll be able to follow me on Amazon and as I say I do this Sunday Sunday session which is basically a deep dive into a particular product. Now I just happened to have done this same live stream with a few technical difficulties hence me rerunning it now on here but I did that this last Sunday this Sunday coming up I will be doing a similar deep dive into the loop deck live so as I say you can find that every Sunday 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and if you head over to takeonetech.live that is where you can follow me on Amazon it's Amazon US but you can watch it from Amazon anywhere in the world so if you like the sort of content I'm creating on my YouTube channel then you can find more of it over there but I digress let us get back into the sort of whole process of how you go about setting up the stream deck so it's all done with the stream deck application so let me just come into here for one second there we go so this is the stream deck application and you'll notice just down beneath me I've got the actual physical device if I just position it so you can actually see it just down there that's the actual stream deck and what you'll notice is we've got all the keys on here and those are represented by those little squares on the screen so this is where you can see start my pro mouse one second it seems to have stopped on me for some reason there we go that should be better just want to be able to show you some of these things funny isn't it these things always seem to quit just at the wrong time just going to make it easier for me to highlight things if I can show you what I'm talking about on the screen there we go that's a bit better isn't it you can see what I'm looking at now so here we've got this basically exact representation of the 32 key if you were using one of the other devices so I've got the mobile here you can see that that's just the 15 key layout and then also we've got the pedal and now those are the three keys for the pedal and in fact that one is my little magnifying glass so that's how I'm triggering that is just by pressing my foot on the pedal but I'll get into how to program this in any case so this is the layout when you first open stream deck it's going to have ignore this one for the moment that's just for me to get back to my main control for the live stream for the time being but it's going to have basically just this one little key in the middle and that is essentially just a link to the Elgato website so once you've seen that you're pretty much done with it and you can just delete it and all we've got here is a series of different actions over on the right hand side and then we've got the space where these actions are going to go on the device over here now there are different what they call plugins which are groupings of actions and so the first one that you're going to notice in fact let me just reorder these potentially in fact I'll just go through like this this will probably be a bit easier so we'll first look at the actual stream deck plugin itself so these are all of the different actions that are related to the stream deck device itself so you've got things like brightness for example I can just drag and drop that one over here this is from the again the stream deck list brightness and then here we can change that to be either brighter or darker and then what that's going to do is that's actually as I press that you'll see that it's actually dimming on the screen down below it's actually dimming the device itself so this is the way that you add things on you just simply drag and drop them and then if I press this button now you'll see that the brightness down below is increasing so as simple as that it's just literally drag and drop and now I've got some control over the the device that happens to not be one I use too much because I tend to just have it set to whatever I want it but no problem if you want to delete a particular action you just simply highlight it and when I say highlight it you can see how this one's got this sort of blue halo around the outside whereas this one hasn't and if I was to click in here that is the sort of active button that you are just editing so I can click in there and just simply click on delete so as well as having the the button itself hello Albert great to see you as well as having the the button itself we've also got this area down here which is where you're going to adjust any parameters that there are with something so for example here we've got one that is a timer so I'm just going to drag this one onto the screen and you can see that now that I've got that one selected down here we've got some information related to it so first of all you've got the icon we can customize icons I'll be talking about how to do that a little bit later but you can change how all of the icons look so that for example like this one here you can see it's got my take one tech logo so I've just created an icon and dragged it onto there but I'll show you how to do that a bit later but you've also got these other things related to that particular action up here so first of all we've got a title you can title these things let's say I want a four minute coffee timer I could just type coffee and you'll notice that it's appeared on the button there and also it has appeared on this button just down there so whatever we are doing over on that side is appearing on the stream deck down here as well so that would be a timer and then let's set that to four minutes so 240 seconds and then the sound would be what you want to play when the timer has finished so if I was to just press on this now then it's going to start that countdown you don't see anything on the screen here but if you have a look on the actual button itself it has actually started counting down from three minutes and you'll just actually be able to see that countdown so if you need to time anything or need to time anything for your stream then you can add little timers and things like that to the screen so I'm just going to delete that one though for now again as we keep going through I'll talk about folders and profiles a little bit later because there is a common path I think that people go through when they're trying to organize their stream deck which is to create a whole series of nested folders but it's not necessarily the best way to do it but I'll come on to that a little bit later I don't want to get too much ahead of ourselves they've also got multi-actions now multi-actions are used for this is where it becomes really powerful as a productivity tool where you want it to basically you press one button and it actually does a whole series of actions and this is great for if you want to maybe when you start up your Mac in the morning or your PC you want to maybe open a few specific applications or maybe you're just shifting from one work mode to another and you want to be able to open up a series of documents and applications and folders or whatever it happens to be you can do that all with multi-actions there's also a whole series of more complex use cases as well which we'll talk about a little bit later as well so let's just move on from the stream deck one because we'll kind of come to these as we go through trying to do some different things but let's come down here to the system section with system this is basically just general things that you can do on your Mac or on your computer and in fact this is really where the majority of the productivity power of stream deck comes in because you can do things in here like just open a website of course we've got bookmarks that we can have in our browser but sometimes just being able to get easy access to a specific website with a touch of a button can be quite useful so that just works by simply dragging on the action to any of the particular buttons if you don't like where it is you can easily just drag it and move it around so once you've put these things in place they're not actually sort of fixed there that's one thing that's a bit frustrating about the loop deck is it's not as easy to reorganize and move things around but with a stream deck you certainly can and once again we've now dragged that website action onto there and then it's just a case of giving it a title so if I type in my website and then type the URL I can't talk and type at the same time it seems take one tech.io there you go so now I've just assigned that to a button you can see how the text need is not auto wrapping so you just come in here and then put in a return the actual text on the the button as well maybe it might be too big or too small we can come and edit the text so you can come in here and make some minor edits you can change the font the font size whether it's bold italics underline and you can change the color and you can also change the position of the text so you can see as I'm pressing these the text on here is moving around and then obviously changing color and things like that as well so you do have that ability to edit what is on the little screens on the buttons and then when you press the button it's simply going to open up and this is just has opened up over here somewhere there you go it's just opened up my website take one tech.io so that is how you can open a website now I mentioned multi actions a moment ago well imagine if you had a series of websites that you need to open for whatever it is you do you know maybe your gmail some other things that you're using as part of your work then you could have a multi-action where you basically just open up a series of websites so let's just have a look at how to do that if I come into here and I'll add in multi-action just in here then you can go through and just literally in fact I think I just jumped ahead a little bit there the multi-action was from here from the stream deck section you can also add this by the way by just right clicking in any button and add create multi-action and then to add in the different actions within that you just double click on it like this and then here you can see it says drag an action from the right and drop it here so if we had you know three websites that we wanted to open you could just simply drag them all across like this and then go through one by one and actually add in the URLs of each of those and then you can also add a title in so if I opened this website you'd see the title then appears just underneath it there so this is how you can actually see in a multi-action all the things that you are opening just a couple of quick questions oh hey Chris great to see you here and the and Albert's asking do you need to have or own a stream deck to use the stream deck app? no you don't it is a completely standalone thing so you just download the stream deck app for the computer and then you would download the I assume you were talking about the iOS app here and then you download the iOS app and it just links up in exactly the same way and actually over wifi so no you don't need the regular stream deck to be able to use the stream deck mobile app which is why it's actually a great way to try out the stream deck before actually buying the hardware device I still pay for the subscription for the mobile app even though I do have the hardware device because it comes in handy sometimes to have that secondary one or also if I'm traveling then I can still have you know stream deck controls on my mobile whilst you know to control the the computer or for live streaming or zoom calls or things like that so that is how to use multi-actions we'll be coming back to multi-actions because there's lots of ways that you can use these for you know series of productivity steps that you might want to take to sort of speed up your workflow hey Aubrey, great to see you here popping in as well I'm trying to put comments up on the screen by clicking on the youtube pop-out window but I need to click here don't I that would help great to see you Aubrey so let's go through and have a look what other system controls you've got the next one is I'll skip over the next one actually I'll come straight on to hotkey a hotkey is basically just anything where you would previously do it with a keyboard shortcut sequence or like combination of keys or I suppose it could just be an individual key but you know like if you were doing control command v for copy and command other way around command c for copying command v for paste you might want to just have a button for that or for any other potential shortcut you could have and as I mentioned before the reason why it's quite useful to have these as buttons as opposed to using the keyboard shortcuts is there are times when you might not have both hands on the keyboard if you're using the mouse or something like that and it's awkward to reach so with this one here this keyboard shortcut or it's called a hotkey actually you can just come down here and where it says hotkey click to assign if you were going to use a copy for example you could just do command c do that try that again command c sometimes by the way with these and then give it a title sometimes when you're doing a sort of a series of you know some of my keyboard shortcuts that have programmed might be control command option shift you know something where you type in really a lot of modifier keys those ones apart from the actual letter you know command shift alt option those ones they're called modifier keys and so sometimes you might find that it's not really taking all of them if you try and just click in here and when it says observing key strokes when you just actually press the combination you might find that it's not actually grabbing them all if that's the case you can actually almost leave a little pause between them so if I was to do say I don't know command option t I could literally just come in here click here and just in quick succession one after the other type almost type them in in a string and then you'll find that it will usually grab them sometimes you can also just click this little drop down here and you can actually add specific modifiers in this way there's a big long list of them but yeah if you if you ever find you're trying to do it and it's not grabbing them just try doing them sort of one after the other in quick succession and then you'll find that it should grab them much like so that is keyboard shortcuts or hotkeys here so that's where yeah all of these things that you know you can't necessarily remember the keyboard shortcuts for all of these applications especially if you're using some complex apps that have you know just a ton of shortcuts then being able to program them into the stream deck is useful because you don't then have to remember the actual keyboard shortcut itself and if you create a dedicated icon for it then that's going to make things a lot easier to to to do I'm just looking at can you pre fill in details such as user name and password you could do that with for websites you could you would have to do that with a secondary action I tend to do stuff like that with with keyboard maestro so you can have it go and fill in specific things in specific locations what you can do with a website is you can use this get request so if you're going to you want it to do something where it's going to fetch some information but it's not really username and passwords and there is a little bit of a a danger to having it pre fill in username passwords and two-factor authentication keys and stuff like that so that might be a bit of a a bit of a dangerous one to have programmed into your stream deck in any case but I do do something similar for some websites with with keyboard maestro so I'll talk about keyboard maestro a little bit later hey keely great to see you here um so let's keep moving through some of these other actions that we've got so we've looked at website we've looked at hotkey well just to come back then to this second one which is hotkey switch this is going to be something where you've actually got something that has basically two different states where it might be something that you're switching on and off and you might use a separate keyboard shortcut to either turn it on or off or it could be just the same keyboard shortcut however you want to be able to sort of toggle it well that's what this is keyboard switch or hotkey switch so if I drag this onto here you can see that it looks like a little switch there it is in its on position and in fact if I come down here you can see that we've actually got what the thing looks like when it's on and what it looks like when it's off or vice versa and I mentioned before about being able to change the icons which we'll look at later this one you can actually change the icon for both states so you'd be able to show you know whether it was on or off and here just as before we entered the hotkey well now basically we've got two hotkeys because we've got the on one and the off one it could be that you're going to use just the same hotkey for each it is just the same key to toggle but it also does it also could be a separate hotkey as well so let's have a little look down here we've also got open so open is to open either an application a file or a folder so if you've got a series of apps that you want to start up you know when you when you get going in the morning then just pressing a button to you know have them all trigger and open up you could do that with a multi-action but it's as simple as coming down here to the where it says the app or the file it doesn't mention folders but you can open folders as well so click on choose it's going to bring up just your regular finder window or application picker file picker whatever you want to call it and so if I just come into my applications then I could select any one of these just pick something at random automator why not click on that and you'll notice that it has actually pulled in the app icon and it's also got the title so it's pulled in the title the name of the application but because we've got the app icon you may think well actually I don't really want to have the title over there because I've got the app icon that I can see what it is from that well where you've got this title field here I mentioned that you can change the font and the size and all of that kind of thing well you can actually just choose not to show it so if I toggle this one off then now you'll see that we've just got the nice clean icon with no text over the top so that is the thing there so that is how to open an application and if I click that it will open the application however if you just select a file instead it will open the file and if the app to open the file in isn't open it it'll obviously just open it just the same as if you were clicking on it in a finder so if you have got some specific things that you use quite regularly I don't know template files tracking files or whatever it happens to be that you'll find you're constantly going in and out of then you can actually just assign the file itself to a button and then you press that and then you'll just be able to get into it from wherever and incidentally that's a sound bit of advice really for using Stream Deck is there is a temptation with this to try and just plan absolutely everything out that you're going to possibly want to do with it from the beginning and then you sort of don't really get into the flow of using it so what's useful to do is sort of notice the things that you are doing regularly that you do as part of your daily routine and then look for a way to automate those things as and when they arise rather than the approach that I took when I first got into well actually again keyboard maestro years ago was I tried to plan out the 2000 potential shortcuts that I might need and I did it all and properly forgot them so getting into a routine with this and getting into a workflow the best part the best way to do that is kind of build it up bit by bit with things that you know that you're going to be using all of the time and as I say you can use this open command to open files but also folders so if you just have a folder that you're constantly referencing on your computer you can do that as well the next one we've got here is text so this is a text snippet so if you use something like text expander on the Mac and there are various options that are similar on the PC as well which is where you type a short little key string in and then it will basically populate a whole string of text well you can do that here with the touch of a button you've got a bit more limitations on it in here compared to something like text expander which is really quite a comprehensive app for all sorts of text expansion but where you might want to be adding different parameters in and all this kind of stuff whereas this is essentially just a case of you type the text you want in here and then when you press the button it goes and populates that in the wherever you happen to be so I've got one for example for if I just press this button here it's going to just populate a string of text which is to my Amazon live my Amazon account so you can create these little text snippets and that's where I tend to use this is for little ad hoc snippets that I want to do for example during a live stream it's very useful for that but you could equally use this for stock responses to emails or messages or if you're running late I'll be there in a minute that kind of thing whatever it happens to be and then just assign it to a button and then you can see here you've got an option to press enter after the message has been submitted so if you want it to just actually put it in and then submit the message you can do that in there as well let me just come back here for one second oh it's okay I just got a little alert then I thought I wondered what that was so that is the text snippets and you've also got multimedia controls down here as well now everything that I've done so far is being kind of one action and you drag it on and it kind of does one thing whereas this one is an example this multimedia control of where it's one physical action on here but actually if you look down here where it says action we can click here and it can do a whole series of things and we're going to select which one we want it to do so because this is multimedia controls this is for basically play pause you know all the kind of multimedia controls that you've generally got across the top of your keyboard function keys but we can assign these here as well to playback skip tracks and play music or volume up and down that kind of thing so one thing here you might want to have a whole set of controls to control these you don't have to drag the same action on over and over again though you can actually just right click on this one to copy it and then just paste it so we can just sort of duplicate that those are all exactly the same but what we might want is that's previous track so maybe this one we want to have as play pause maybe this one is next track maybe this one is I don't know volume up and then this one is volume down like that just saying bye to Jeff Jeff in the discord there saying good night great to see you Jeff good night so yeah for those that are not aware I do have the live streamer backstage thing going on or the backstage pass rather in the discord so if you're not already a member of the discord you can find that at I come back over here for a second takeonetech.io slash family and join the discord server and so there's lots of conversation going on in there but also if you are interested in joining my channel memberships you can find the join button just down below this video and at the backstage pass level then you get access to the the backstage area of the live stream and we have a little bit of a chat before the live stream starts and then also when we finish the live stream we just sort of continue the conversation in there so you can find that with channel memberships just down below this video but I digress slightly saying goodbye to Jeff so in here back in here again this was the multimedia controls and then now yes basically we can control these up and down with these keys so that there is all of the different system controls that we've looked at but you'll notice that as well as the system controls there is a whole load of other plugins that I've got down here as well so I'll have a little look at some of those but first of all I'll just mention that all of these camera switching and things like that that I'm doing right now I'm doing with an application called Ecamm Live so Ecamm Live is live production software for the Mac the best live production software there is and that's what I use for my live streams but it's also what I use for creating all of my videos but also for really leveling up my zoom appearance as well because all of the sort of production quality that you can bring to live stream and video you can also take in using their virtual camera function into zoom as well and that allows you to basically really just look a little bit head and shoulders above everyone else in your zoom calls you can get a free trial from takeonetech.io and sorry takeonetech.io slash ecamm and you'll get a free trial there and then you can find lots of videos on my site I'm just getting distracted by some very very unnecessary chat comments but so there is where you can find out more about ecamm life before I get too distracted and if you really want to level up your ecamm live skills you can also try out my ecamm live masterclass because one of the things that I found with the videos on my site is ecamm has been updated so frequently that often videos that you'll find on youtube are slightly out of date and there are now easier and better ways to do the things that we can do with ecamm and so the ecamm live masterclass was created specifically for to be your sort of online resource for all things ecamm so you can head out over to ecammlivemasterclass.com to check that out and actually if you try the ecamm live masterclass then you can get two free months of ecamm live as one of the perks with that so the ecamm live masterclass is $147 but it includes $150 of perks and special promotions for you as well and one of which is if you are new to ecamm you can get an extra two months free of ecamm so that's ecamm live masterclass.com so back to this and thank you very much for the mods for just getting on top of those spam comments so let's get back to the the application itself and I was going to talk about these different plugins that we've got here so each of these ones we've looked at the stream deck plugin and the system but there are all of these other things here so these are some of them are sort of built in that you'll have when you first open stream deck there'll be some of these already here and in fact the way that you can I'll just get to your comments in a second so there's a comment coming in anyone know how to make a stream deck multi-action where you take a screenshot and then open that screenshot on monitor x yes what you could do is whatever the keyboard shortcut is for its command shift if you were going to take a full screen keyboard if you were going to take a full screen screenshot on a Mac it would be command shift command shift 4 is it or is that for an area that's for an area so command shift 5 I think is just command shift 5 does the full screen the only issue with that actually is you can see that it's you have to actually select the space that you wanted so let me give that one some more thought it should be easy but my brain is not computing it right now I'll come back to that though let me just actually flag that and start that I'll come back to that comment Walnut's 84 by the way hello and welcome welcome to the stream so yeah these are different plugins there will be some that will be there when you first start up the stream deck and others that you can add in and I'll show you how to do that but what you can also do is reorganize these so this little icon that we've got at the top here you can come down here and basically toggle on any one of these that you don't want to see so for example I mentioned that e-cam live was the best live streaming software there is which is why I've deactivated the obs plugin because I don't use that that one you can also reactivate the or deactivate any of the individual actions as well so if you find that you don't use any of these specific ones then you can you can just deactivate those there so yeah simply orbs the command shift 3 is for the whole screen the thing I'm trying to think then is actually getting it to open that screenshot in the to a specific monitor that's the that's going to be a little trick there because as a default it's not going to specifically open the screenshot and so you'd have to have to have it so that you could basically get the last screenshot there's a way to do this but it's a little bit tricky I think there would be a way to do this but yeah it might be a little bit a little bit tricky anyway let me give it some more thought I'll get back to that hey Rich great to see you here as well and that's exactly it Keeley opening on a specific monitor we'll need some other apps like Moomore Keyboard Maestro indeed and specifically it's even just the point of opening up the screenshot because it will save the screenshot with a certain title the way that I would do it is I would have some automation that basically when you take the screenshot there's an extra little step in here which grabs the latest thing with start the latest file starting with the word screenshot from the wherever it is you have it saved to and get it to open that in the in the thing so there is definitely an extra bit of a an automation that would need to be be done there but yeah I'll go I'll give that some more thought I'm not sure I'll get round to that today but I'll I'll figure out a way to do that so I'm digressing once again it's another one of those squirrel moments that's the problem with me you give me give me a little technical problem to solve and my mind just goes off on it so I'll I'll continue to be distracted that by that throughout the live stream but then once you've you've selected the the plugins that you want from here that are the the ones that I just sort of built in you can also then move these up and down so to rearrange them and put them where you want them but what you can also do is if you want to add in some new ones then the you can't find the ones you're looking for in here there is what they call the stream deck store but don't be fooled by this it says it's a store but actually at the moment everything in here is free so it's not like you have to pay for this stuff there people make plugins for stream deck that are all free there's also icons and music and things like that that will get to in a little while as well I'm sure at some point they will open it up for people to be able to put paid products in there like icon packs that you have to pay for but for the time being everything in there is is free so when you open the stream deck store and by the way I skipped over how to do that this little icon just up here at the top if you click on that it will open up the stream deck store and the first page you'll go into is this discover page it's really useful if you are someone who use uses stream deck regularly you know like by regularly if you've got when you probably use it like all the time every day but if you do it's still useful to go into the stream deck store because it does have things like the what's new with stream deck monthly roundup for July and I often just pop in here and just have a little look because you'll find that there are new plugins that you didn't realize existed and so then you'll you'll figure out you know some new things that you can do with it that you didn't realize were possible so coming in and having a look at this little splash page is certainly useful and then it highlights certain products and plugins and all that kind of stuff so it's quite kind of useful to just come and have a little check in with it check in here from time to time next one down would be plugins that's where we're going to be able to get all of these different actions for different things and you'll see that there is a big long list so you'll come in first of all it should just be selected to all so this is all of the different plugins that you can get for stream deck at the moment by the way if you are looking on a Mac it will show you only the ones that are available on Mac and same with PC so there may be some that you see in here if you're on a PC that are not available to you but more than likely it's the other way round there are far more available on PC than there are for Mac so you may have more than this that you're looking at if you are on a PC but then it's just a simple case of you know if you see one that you want to use like the Twitch Studio perhaps you can see the big install button here if you have already got it installed on your in your stream deck you'll notice that it's got an uninstall button here instead so you can clearly see which ones you've already got and which ones you haven't and then as I say just simply click on the little install button and then it will just go ahead and prompt you to say are you sure you want to install it and you click on yes click on install and then it will just go and install it on your stream deck and then you can see the little time bar moving up there and so then that will again appear in that sidebar so let's just come back out of here. I'll come back into the store a little bit later when we start looking at icons but I just wanted to highlight a few that I mean there's really what you do with stream deck is going to depend on all sorts of things you know what you what your use cases are what you you know what you do for in your day to day business that you might want to do with it but there are a couple here that are worth sort of mentioning so obviously the stream deck one is the one that you're going to be using to control stream deck and system pretty much I think everyone's going to use that to some point for doing stuff on their computer but then for example I use Ecamm Live Ecamm Live has got I would say the most comprehensive plug-in of anyone that I've seen of any application they're just constantly adding new little functions to it so all of these actions here are ones that I use to control Ecamm Live so it just means that I can control everything from the stream and also from all of my videos that I produce can all be just controlled by this the stream deck so hats off to Ken and Glenn the guys behind Ecamm to be continually adding new things in here but there are other applications as well so discord we've got some here to control discord so obviously very popular among streamers but growing more and more popular among normal folks who are realizing that Keeley was right and it is an awesome platform for building community and so you can check out mine at takeonetech.io slash family we've got the discord community over there but the plugin here is specifically for controlling when you are in what they call voice channels in discord so think of it like a sort of a zoom call within discord if you like so we've got some things to do here mute and so on so we've got those controls in there so that's one way you would have to go and actually search for the discord plugin and add it in speaking of zoom we do still use zoom a lot these days and so there is a plugin for zoom as well and this allows you to do some of the general things that you might want to do in a zoom meeting so for example muting turning off your video sharing your screen leaving the meeting to avoid that awkward moment where you say bye bye and then everybody kind of go searching around how do we get out of this meeting well now you can you can just assign that to a button so you can be like right see you boof I'm out of here press the button now there is actually although you can see here there are only around 10 different actions in zoom there is a whole series of keyboard shortcuts for things that you might want to do in zoom and so you'd be forgiven for thinking that what you could do is for all of those other things the best thing to do would be to come into your system use the keyboard shortcut the hotkey action and just program all of those different shortcuts in zoom to hotkeys hotkey actions in here and then you could control all of zoom with it the issue with that is bear in mind that hotkeys only work when you are in that particular application so for example if I use command c to copy it's only going to copy what I'm copy you know from the application that I'm actually in whereas often you might find with zoom in particular that you are maybe you are doing a screen share so you're demoing something in another application and zoom might not actually be the front most application so in this particular case with the zoom plugin they do have this one here which is called custom shortcut and what that allows you to do is you can add type in the keyboard shortcut for zoom and it will pass it onto zoom even if zoom isn't the front most application and what that allows you to do is really have full control over zoom even if zoom it doesn't happen to be at the front and in fact this is one of the icon packs that I created if I come back out of here not that one where is it this one here so I actually created all of the icons for these and you can find these in my store so it is at I should have typed this one out this is one that I haven't got typed out take one tech.io slash store there we go that is where you can find and it's in the description actually so if you're watching on the replay you can find it in there this is where you can find my icon pack so I've actually already pre-programmed this I'll be showing you later on when we get into profiles about how you can basically import profiles as well so if you don't want to go through and program this or yourself and create all of the icons yourself then you can just go and grab this from the from the store so it's one of a number of different icon packs that I've got available in fact let me just take this opportunity to show you if I come over here like this there we go this is my website if you come over to store then here you'll find the the two courses on the Ekam Live Masterclass and the Zoom Masterclass and then down you can see I've got these different icon packs for Zoom Ekam Live YouTube Keynote and a couple of others there as well so these basically just are all pre-set up so you can just import them into your stream deck so I digress once again as often I do let me just get back over into my little demo thing to be able to show you this there we go so the Zoom one is one that is I think most people these days use Zoom at some point so that is a really handy plug-in you've also got ones here which go sort of hand in hand with Zoom really if you are doing presentations into Zoom meetings because we've got one plug-ins for PowerPoint and for Keynote and that allows you to sort of advance your slides forward and next slide again obviously you can do that if you've got a little you know one of the little remote keyboard remote presentation clickers you could you can use that in there but often it's easy just to have you know the Stream Deck has been mission control so you can control everything from that from that as well so I have when I'm on a Zoom call I've got my Zoom controls I've got some Ecamm controls to flick between the scenes that I've got going into Zoom and then if I am doing something where I've got a presentation going then I'll be using some of these actions as well so it really just does become that you know with the Stream Deck in front of you that is what you're using to control everything so let's just keep going through here and I'll show you a couple of other ones that you might find useful we'll get onto this automation one a little bit later there are also some controls in here for YouTube and Twitter and Twitch and those are specifically for when you are well the Twitter one is actually to just send out a tweet so you can just drag and drop this on here and then you're going to have it connected to an account and I'll show you how to do that in a moment as well but then you just type in the text and basically whatever you type in there when you press the button it's just going to send that out as a tweet you can also attach an attachment to it as well but then with YouTube you can add a chat message so if I want to add a message into the chat this would be a message and if I press that now it should with a bit of luck it just comes straight into the chat I wonder if I've not got it connected to the correct account at the moment it's not popping up but if I had got that connected correctly to this account then that would just pop in as a chat message but it is a little bit it's obviously not working because I'm doing a live demo of it but in any case that is what that is for you've also got viewers as well so it will pull in how many viewers are on the live stream but again I'm not don't think I'm connected to the account that I'm streaming on at the moment so let's have a look at how you connect these accounts well that would be in the settings and so if you come into settings you've got accounts in here and this will show you the Twitch Twitter and YouTube accounts that you are connected to so you can only be connected to one at any given time and you just go through and add in your credentials in there and then that will make these things work so this is for the as I say the Twitter one the YouTube there is one for Twitch as well I don't don't use Twitch so but you can add in some similar things in there as well so keeping on going down these different plugins one there that I just that was the one that I showed you as an example to add it in was Philips Hue so if you got Philips Hue lights you can control these from here another one that might be useful is sometimes the the plugins that you install they will they will install as a plugin like this where you've got a little folder of all of the actions are that are within it sometimes though what you're installing is literally just a single action and so sometimes those will appear somewhere else and I'll show you where they are often they might just appear in this custom area here and these are basically things that are just a single action although we can look at some of the parameters we can use for them a bit later but one that I just wanted to highlight here was this IFTTT so if this then that is a website IFTTT.com this is a a sort of web based automation website that allows you to set a whole series of parameters and it's then the name obviously comes from if this if something happens then do something else and you can create all of these little automations well there is a plugin for it for Stream Deck so that if you want to be able to trigger things that you you know anything you can do with IFTTT you can now do with the Stream Deck because basically you just drop this in and then it can pass that command onto if this then that also on the automation side of things another one here is this KM link which is about keyboard maestro so I'll I'll come on to that in a moment as well and incidentally we're talking a lot about live streaming so I talked about Twitch and YouTube and obviously the Stream Deck is something that was built by streamers for live streamers as well although it is you know a huge productivity tool but if you are interested in live streaming then you may also be interested in my podcast the live streamer backstage podcast the first full proper episode was recorded this week it is live every week at Tuesday at 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on LinkedIn Live and also on Amazon Live as well and this week it was JP Hitek so we had a great conversation with him the podcast itself is going to be released in the next day or two actually I'm going to try and do it so that it's recorded on Tuesday and it's out by Thursday I was going to do it the following week but I think I can speed up my workflow there a little bit so yeah expect the JP one to be dropping soon if you go to live streamer backstage.com you'll get to the podcast and it's available in all your favorite podcast players as I say it's recorded live on Amazon and LinkedIn but I will also be posting the recording which will be slightly edited you know what I'm like with editing minimal editing where possible but that is also now going to be posted onto my YouTube channel as well so expect when the actual podcast drops in the podcast player the edited version will also be coming out into the YouTube channel so if you want to just watch the replay you can catch it there but definitely if you want to join in the conversation then you can find it over on as I say Amazon Live or LinkedIn Live now this week or this next week on next Tuesday I'm going to be talking to Dr. Efrain Lopez or Dr. Elo as many people know him and one of the things that being really impressed with him is his consistent content workflow that he has built up whereby I'm just constantly seeing his stuff and one of the things about being a live streamer is repurposing your content but also building awareness about what it is you're doing and I think that Elo has just been doing something really great with that of late it's just something that's caught my attention so I'm really interested to learn from him about the way that he's got set up and as somebody who is similar to me in which he's got a small window of opportunity every day to focus on his content creation amongst a full-time job and juggling family life as well really keen to get some insights from him so that's the live streamer backstage podcast available on Amazon Live LinkedIn Live replay on YouTube and also obviously in your favorite podcast play as well so with that said let me just come back I'll just check in with the chat because I've seen a few comments and they've been getting away from me slightly Chris Keyboard Maestro again I know it's the thing about Keyboard Maestro is I'll just come clean with the reason why I've struggled with this is a beginner's guide to Keyboard Maestro there is so much that it can do I've been struggling with figuring out like what is the best sequence to go through with this in terms of laying it all out from a beginner's perspective I don't know I think there are three or four videos on it now although only one that is specifically the beginner's guide video the video one of it it just can do so much that I've just got to try and fit it's almost I mean it is really a full sort of course in itself really so that's I think that's where the friction has been and whenever I've got some sort of friction it's kind of oh I'll have to come back to it that's probably why I've kind of delayed it slightly it's just just trying to grapple with what's the best way to lay this out for beginners so that it's they're told how to use it in a logical progression if you see what I mean so but yeah it is high on the it is high on the list I just need it to float that a little bit further to get to the top so yeah that one about two-factor authentication so that one there Chris about the open a website log in and then go to Orthe and look for the two-factor authentication key if you're using Orthe on the on the desktop that we could do that with keyboard maestro I'll perhaps talk with you offline about that or in the discord I'll do a little thing about that in the discord because yet you can do that I've got whole sequences of stuff that is similar to that where you're on a website and it's got to go from one to another do a series of steps and then you know put in details and so on let's let's have a little look going through here did I say hello to Dina? I don't know just noticed your comment there if I didn't thank you Dina so cool cool okie dokie I'm going to try and catch up so your your local tire center I'm getting you not my local tire center but who knows does super macro super macro I'm not sure what super macro is trying to utilize my stream deck even more great video what is super macro? I'm not sure what super macro is I don't know what that is you'll have to have to expand on that a little bit more but you've got me intrigued I like macros so I'm sure to like super macros right let's go back over to hear them so we've had a look at the different plugins and the way that you basically add the plugins I've talked about a few of a few of my favorites that you can use and it's a case of really just going through that store and taking a look at the full list really because you'll see some here that just sort of leap out to you our mouse movements and clicks that's what super macro is it so yeah with that one I use I that's something that I would use keyboard maestro for so with a keyboard maestro on the Mac I don't know if you're Mac or PC by the way but certainly on the Mac I use keyboard maestro and that can do all that it can move the mouse click on the mouse on different parts of the screen but you can also use found image so in fact I'll come on to this a little bit later because with keyboard maestro you can basically have it look for a specific image on the screen and that's how I do my website automation using keyboard maestro and stream deck is it's going to go and find the login button an example of this is whenever I finish a video I've got one button that I press it that I presses that I press one button that I presses and what that does is it opens up YouTube studio and then it actually physically moves the mouse over and clicks on the button to upload video then it moves the mouse and it's doing all of this by actually looking for the image that it needs to click on and it goes through this full sequence to actually go through and upload the video and open up some other windows that I need to type in the description and all this kind of stuff and it does about I would say 20 different things but it's just I finish the video and it's like if the video is good to go I'll just press a button and it'll just do it all so yeah keyboard maestro is really good for that and in fact whilst we're talking about it keyboard maestro there is a plugin for keyboard maestro but there's also a third party like made by keyboard maestro but that's more for control in stream deck with keyboard maestro because that's something else you can do as part of the keyboard maestro macros you can have it trigger something that you've got built into stream deck but this one here this KM link is the one that you want for actually just triggering your keyboard maestro macros and it's just a single little action here but basically just down below it says select macro and you've just got a full list of all of your different macros that you can just scroll through and when you when you press that would help if I didn't cover what I was doing with a comment wouldn't it so just there select macro and so basically anything that you can control with anything that you can program as a macro with keyboard maestro you can basically just do with the press of a button but we're getting on to some slightly more advanced stuff so let's have a look free function repair next time in I'm in Australia I appreciate that I'll hold you to that so let's keep going down now because those are just an example of some of the widgets I'm getting ahead of myself into some of the more advanced sort of productivity stuff here but that's how easy it is to just sort of drag and drop things on in terms of adding stuff to the stream deck and hopefully you've been able to see that as I'm doing stuff over there it's also appearing on the stream deck down here as well now at some point what's going to happen is you're going to fill up the stream deck so when you do you've got a few different options one of which is you'll notice down here it says page or there pages and we've just got one well I can click on the plus and I can create a new page adding the new page basically you can see it's now gone blank but we've got this little arrow to go back to the previous page and now you can see I'm doing this just with the stream deck as well so that is next page and then previous page so I've got two pages there you can add up to 10 pages so I could add a whole series of pages and if I just add on some random little actions to here so you can see that I am sort of scrolling through them it would help if I made some different actions so it doesn't all look the same just drag those on like that so you can see that as I'm basically scrolling through these pages it is showing me those different sets of keys so that is one way that you can organize and have you know expand beyond the 32 or 15 or whatever number of keys you've got but one other thing that we've got on here is folders now I'm going to tell you about folders first because it is usually the way that people first think that they want to organize their stream deck because it's logical we're used to managing file systems and things like that with folders so in the stream deck we've got here this very top action is create folder and if I drop that on here we've now got the little folder sign we could call that whatever we want and when you press that button you go into this and this is kind of like a folder of actions and you can add a whole load of more actions in here you can't have pages in folders so you are just limited to 32 or 15 keys whatever is minus one because you have to have this one to get back out of the folder and the first thing I did when I got stream deck was I thought great I'm going to just organize my entire stream deck with folders and I'll create one page that's got a series of folders on for me to just dive in and get into all of these other different use cases that I've got I would recommend that that is not the best way to do it now having gone through and done that and then scrapped it and started over again there is something else on stream deck called profiles and with profiles basically that is think about a profile as being like a specific use case that you've got for it so right now I'm just doing a demo but if I come into here this is my Ecamm Live profile for recording videos and live streaming on on using Ecamm Live so this is my sort of take one tech recording profile so this has got all the different actions that I use for recording and I mentioned one of the limitations of folders is you can't have multiple pages well with a profile it's basically just a fresh set of you know a fresh stream deck to work with so here I've got my first page I've got another page so these are all stuff that I use when sort of preparing for a live stream I've got another page over here which is different templates that I use for buttons and you can see I've actually got five I'm pointing down here over on that side wherever it is I've actually got five pages for my Ecamm Live profile just for take one tech so that is one specific use case the way that you create a profile is in here this little drop down you can see here I've got all of my different profiles that I use and there is one right at the bottom there that is just new profile so you can click that and it'll create a completely blank one for you to start a fresh with and let's just do that actually new profile it's going to start completely blank one page with that single button in the middle there but that's a little bit tricky because now we're just in that profile how do we actually switch back and forth between these profiles well there is this button here called switch profile so just as in the folder when you went into the folder and then you had that little back button to get back up into the the profile that you just in well here we can kind of simulate exactly that functionality in any case because we can use this switch profile and then we could just say right what profile do we want to go to well down here is where we've got obviously the settings for all the actions so we could give this a title the device I'll talk about this in a moment because you can actually use one stream deck to switch profiles on another stream deck which is has a number of uses I'll talk about that a little bit later but for the time being the device is just on the current device so let me switch back to watch shall I switch to where was that demonstration one that was actually this profile one so now if I press that button it's actually going to take me back to that profile that we were just in so whereas before we'd created a folder and we could go in and out of that folder well let's say I just get rid of that folder maybe just delete it and instead I use switch profile instead and then let's go to that profile three so now I've basically just completely replicated what we had with folders but I'm doing it with profiles instead so I'm going into that profile that we've just created but now we have multiple pages and then I'm coming back out of it why else is this useful well the thing is because we can use this switch profile to switch to any profile from anywhere it means that this folder or this collection of icons we can also access from anywhere as well so there are cases where I want to be able to get into a particular grouping of actions and then get back out again but I don't want to have to go through you know you know a whole system a whole root if you like of getting what the term is now you know what I mean I don't have to go in and out of a specific profile to get into a folder so I could access profile three from anywhere so just as here I can get into it from here and let's just add something onto the screen so we can see it's the same one just as I can get into it from here what I could also do is maybe I might want to just access that from here as well so if I just go to switch profile then I can just easily come in here and access it from here as well because what I found was there would be certain things where I might have like a collection of actions that I'd grouped together in a folder and then I would maybe copy and paste the folder into another area or into another folder so that I could access it from there as well then I'd go and make changes to the first grouping in the first folder but those changes wouldn't be reflected in the second one I don't know if I'm explaining this very well but basically with profiles you get all of the benefits of folders but with some added benefits and without the limitations so I'd recommend when you are setting your stream deck from the start think about it in terms of profiles and use cases I do still occasionally use folders but very sparingly it's like if I've literally just got a group of actions that I just want to test out something or I just want to keep them in there just only ever going to be used for that particular thing so for example like in Ecamm there might be some stuff that I don't really use that often it doesn't warrant having its own screen and I might just want to dip into it at times to get to those actions so but generally I'd use profiles all the time over over folders so what I would recommend then is having a home screen effectively which is where you're going to link to all of your profiles so if I go to my home screen from here this is my sort of home screen this is where I get into a series of other profiles along here this is where I get into a series of profiles that are specific for apps I've got a few things that I just have on the home screen in any case I've got a few zoom controls just because I'm in that so much that it's just handy to always have those on the home screen a few little emojis that I use I'm either happy laughing grateful or in agreement those are my four core states and any other emojis I can access from here as well and so yeah this is kind of my home screen but then each of these is basically linking to another profile so I've got my profile here for Omnifocus so when I go into that this is when I'm doing stuff in Omnifocus and managing my task management system then I can control all of that from here I mentioned the zoom one so I've got that on it it's dedicated profile as well and then you'll notice that all of them have got this little home button at the top this orange home button so all that is is just a link to a profile and the profile I've just called home and that is this this is this this home profile so there's it went to the wrong one there this is this this home profile you can manage profile so I've shown you how to add in a profile by clicking this little drop down but just cunningly off the screen let me move that up a little bit you can see that there is also no it's still just off the screen you can see that there is also this edit profile now if you click on edit profile it's going to take you into the same place as the settings so the settings is up here and if I click on that it's going to take you into this profiles section and here you've got a list of all your profiles you can reorder them in terms of you know the order that they appear in that list you can also add new profiles from here as well you can also right click and duplicate sorry I'm just quickly looking at Keely Keely says I haven't been able to find a streamed action for opening a folder yet it's just the open command keely if I go back into this one let me just I'll just quickly demo demo this oh open a streamed folder no no there isn't sorry sorry sorry no there is there is only there is only just the actual button that's the limitation of folders that's why I just use profiles because profiles you can actually have opening a profile as part of a multi-action whereas folders are just intended to be just yeah just this kind of standalone thing so no unfortunately there is there is no one and that's I just I just recommend using a profile so I have that when I go into for example just coming back to my I'm jumping about a little bit here but this should make sense so here like for example when I go into my live streamer backstage set up so this is when I'm recording my podcast you can see that this is actually a multi-action and so clicking on this what it does is it switches my ecum live profile to my live streamer backstage profile where I record everything for the podcast but it's also got two profile switches for stream deck one of which is switching my stream deck excel this device here on my desk to my live streamer backstage profile but it also switches my stream deck pedal which is down on the floor to the three actions that I want for that as well so yeah there's no no similar thing though for for for folders in in stream deck so yeah that's just another reason why I find that profiles profiles work better for that but coming back into the settings there's a couple of things to note with with this which may or may not catch you out so these are all the different profiles that I've got now you can have this open you can have a profile open when you open a specific application so if I'd got one in here for excel which I have I could actually just go into here and select the application and find excel and add excel in so that every time I open excel it switches over the profile on the stream deck to the buttons for excel which might sound really useful but for me because I do a lot of screen demos and also because I spend a lot of time on zoom where maybe I'm trying to show somebody something in an application I don't want the stream deck deciding what it's going to have on the screen for me so I don't want it to automatically switch over to my excel just because I happen to have made excel the front most application so that might be a bit unique to me you might find that really useful from a productivity point of view to have stream deck just automatically be in the set of actions for the particular application you're using so if so just know that you can do that one little point that might catch you out is make sure that if you if you have got if you have got profiles that you want to be using just and switching between them freely make sure that none of them have got this make this my default profile checked because what will happen is when you open another application that doesn't have a profile assigned to it it will just go back to whatever that was and this was something that caught me out for ages that I had one particular app one particular profile that had this checked and then I'd be going and doing something usually in a live stream or a demo or in zoom or something and I'd open up a specific application that didn't have anything assigned to it and it would switch to these this other profile so just make sure that yeah this default profile if you've got more than one that doesn't have an application assigned to it you likely want this unchecked on all of them so I hope that I hope that makes it makes sense you can also from in here if you click the little drop down something that I definitely recommend doing is go to this backup all and you can create a backup so once you've spent some time getting things set out as you want them then definitely go through and create a backup and ideally have that as a recurring little task on your task manager to go in and sort of back it up intermittently to make sure that you have got a backup and then restore from backup obviously if you have any issue I've never had anything happened with my stream deck in 18 months that has required me to back up or restore from a backup but it's nice to know that it is there some people have had issues occasionally so as with all things it's always good to have a backup you can also export a profile so when I make my my icon packs for stream deck I've created the profile and then I export the profile and then that's what people download when they download the icon packs and then they can import those just by coming to here click on import and then you just import the file and it'll bring in all of the actions and it will also bring in any icons as well that people have assigned to it in the import in the export process so that's a great way to share setups if you've maybe set some up for somebody else or indeed if you're going to create digital downloads of your you know setups as I've done with my icon packs then that is how you would do that the one caveat with that is to make sure that if somebody's importing your your profile that they also have to have the required plugins it's not going to go and grab the plugins so for example the one that I've created for zoom then if somebody hasn't been in and downloaded the zoom plugin for stream deck then just importing my profile won't do that part for them they'd have to go through and do that themselves but apart from that that is how you you know how you import and export another great way to share between computers so if you've got multiple computers with stream decks you can do that that way as well to export the profile whilst we are in the preferences we've kind of looked at accounts and profiles we should probably also look at the other tab in here which is this general tab this is where you're going to see the software version check for updates you can always do that there will be intermittent updates come and then it'll tell you whether you've got the latest version or not at the time of recording we're on <IP_ADDRESS> so you can come in here and check for updates one thing I'll mention though is if we come further down here you'll notice that it says firmware version as well now here there is always a button here it always says check for updates you can always check for updates with firmware there is no button to say check for updates but what happens is when there is an update available you'll see a button that appears here to say update available you know download it or whatever the thing that catches people out though is it it'll often come as part of a software update and so every time you go and update the software so if you check for updates and it says there's one available and you go through and update the software what it doesn't do is automatically update your firmware as well but what you'll generally find or often find is you'll update the software and then if you go back into this page here you may find that there's a firmware update suddenly just appeared like as soon as you've reopened the app so what I'd recommend is anytime you get an update just come back into this one more time after the update has happened and just see if there's a firmware update as well because usually there's some sort of firmware that goes along with the software update but as I say they don't do that all in one go as part of the the software update process and that would go for by the way all the different devices you've got so you might have the software is going to be the software that you're seeing on the computer this one that we've been looking at but this firmware is for the the actual device which is probably why they don't go and update it all at the same time as the software because here you can come through the different devices and then you'll see if there is any firmware available for them so also whilst we are in this section this is as I say where you can change the device between we've got Stream Deck Mobile Stream Deck Pedal Stream Deck XL those are the ones that I've got connected you can give them different names as well to make it more easy you know if you've got two excels you want to be able to differentiate between them you can also change the device orientation now what this is going to do is basically just rotate the icons on the screen so if I click device orientation and change that to 90 what you'll see is that all of the icons on my screen have now flipped around 90 degrees if I just flip them back you'll be able to see that a little bit easier so if I flip them back now you'll see all the all the icons down there just basically rotate so they all stay in exactly the same positions on the the screen they're not going to move around anywhere but you're just literally rotating them around so if you want to have the Stream Deck maybe on its side you know next to your next to your computer or something like that next to your keyboard rather then that's what that's for and you can rotate them basically 90, 180 or 270 you can also set the device to go to sleep so I've got mindset to never but I've got a key to put it to sleep I'll show you that in a moment but you can have it if you just want it to sleep after a particular time of inactivity you can do that in here as well there is also a screensaver function and that's basically it says screensaver it's essentially just an image that you're going to have on the screen you can create animated GIFs and use those to create you know a fancy moving screensaver effect I just haven't bothered and you can also change the brightness of the device here as well you can see as I'm doing that it's moving the brightness up and down here and then yeah there we've got the the firmware as I mentioned so that is in the preferences that's about all we need to to look at in the the preferences I've talked about switching profiles one thing I haven't talked about is actually the the icons and how to change icons so let's have a little look at that if I take any one of these actions you can see down here we've got a sort of representation of the icon and in fact let me come to this one because this was this one that was the switch so it's going to toggle something on and off and you can see that we've got two separate icons the way that you add an icon to something is if you've got it on your computer already so you've maybe you've created your own icons I'll talk about how to do that a little bit later as well if you've created your icons or you've bought an icon pack then it's as simple as if I just go and open up I should have done this in advance if I just open up some of my icon packs we'll get this one up here so here you can see this is a selection of icons that I created for Ecamm Live this is what I use for my live stream and I like to have pictograms basically so I don't tend to use the text function that you've got on the screen itself I'd rather just have something that where the image itself tells me what the button is I find that's a lot just easier more intuitive for me but all you do is let's say I wanted to use this icon here this isn't necessarily the right one for what we're talking about but it shows you the principle you just literally drag it and drop it on there and then when you've got a button that has two states like this you would then just go and select the other state and then you could drag and drop an icon on there and you'll see that that's changed on this this button and then we've got the on and off state basically shown as those two things so it's very easy if you've got these images on your computer already or you've bought them from somewhere to just drag and drop them like that there is another way that you can do this though so first of all if you click this little top little in fact let me come to a different one here you can see there's a little arrow just up at the top there and if I click on that you've got three options either set from file that's basically just going to open up the file you know the finder so that you can then go and just grab the file rather than dragging and dropping you've also got create a new icon on this side as well now that one I wouldn't really recommend that opens up a website and the website that opens up is Algato's super deluxe icon creator page which is a bit of a a bit of a I'm not a fan of it it's not a great interface it does have a series of icons here so you might want to just check it out because you might find that there is just the icon that you need they do tend to be aimed more at live streamers in terms which would make sense really but you've got lots of ones here for like plain media there's some twitch icons and things like that but if you're starting to do a whole you know create a whole set of icons for some specific use case one thing I like is for them all to look consistent so they don't look messy on the device which is why I like to create my own and yet you can there you can sort of drag and drop these so here you can set a background color you can change the color from somewhere over here just pick a color so we can give it a background color and then I can add in any one of these icons whoops I'm adding on too many there's a way to take these off from somewhere as well it's just a little bit kluge for one of a better word to be able to create them in here but I'll just say it's definitely worth having a look at but I just find it's not the best interface and I'll show you a better way to create free icons instead but I digress that is the option that you've got here to either load, set from file or create new icons so to create new icon I'm not so much for but you've also got this stream deck icon library and this was something that was added in a fairly recent update in 5.2 I think so if we come back to the stream deck store and once again you access the stream deck store from this little button just up at the top corner and as well as the plugins that we've looked at you've also got icons and with icons there are a series of some by Algato our third party where they've created their own icon packs and you can download them and some of these are really good and in fact one that I'll definitely recommend is Sideshow FX so let me go over to their website because I've got a couple of icon packs on my website but Sideshow FX I've got a huge number of really great icon packs for a lot of the creative apps so Adobe Creative Suite Final Cut Pro things like that as well let me come over and just show you their website and basically they're available for sale on the Sideshow FX website and you can find them for they've got all of these things down here so like Blender as I say all the Creative Suite DaVinci Resolve and by the way the icons for if you've got an icon pack for stream deck it'll work on loop deck as well generally I mean the actual images will sometimes they have built-in profiles sometimes not but Sideshow FX in fact let me just drop this in the chat because it's definitely worth checking out for some really sort of great professional app icons there you go Premiere Pro DaVinci Resolve and when I say icon packs they're icon packs let's go and click on this one for example Premiere Pro what you'll see is $19.99 new for where is it $19.99 how many how many has it got there you go 680 icons so it's got basically it can control all of the functions that you're probably going to want to do in Premiere Pro and it's $20 for 680 icons well the reason I mentioned this is because before you go and buy their full icon pack what you might want to do is come over to the store the stream deck store because you'll see that we've got Sideshow FX and here they have actually got the Premiere Pro icon pack the only thing is instead of 680 icons it's only got 70 so that they're using this is basically a way for you to get a sample of the icon pack but what you might find is if you're not actually you know using all of the functions you may find that this icon pack that you can get from here has actually got all the things that you're likely to need for it and that's the case with me I don't really do editing and the few things that I do occasionally need to do I use Premiere Pro just because I'm an Adobe sweet user so there's a couple of things that I've done my podcast for example I'm chopping little bits and adding little bits in to that for the video podcast so I've just been doing that in Premiere Pro and they've got just a few little icons that I need in here so definitely check out the icon packs in the store and all you do with this is if you are going down here you see one that you like let's have a little look at DaVinci Resolve don't really actually use that but nevertheless sideshow FX just click on install it's going to pop up with this little message again click on install there and then it's going to go through and add that so yeah definitely come through and have a look they're adding more and more in here all the time for different applications so there's one for Illustrator there Final Cut Pro lots as I say lots by Sideshow FX Cinema 4D and once you've done it it's going to say installing and then if I come back out of here so now when I want to add in one of those icons if I click on the little arrow here open Stream Deck icon library what that's going to do is pop up this one and this is where you're going to have all the icons that you've downloaded from the store basically so all of the the built-in ones but also the ones that you've downloaded from the store I've just realised have I got to trip mode on oh no it wasn't tough but anyway there you go so there is the the Premiere Pro ones and you can basically just I've got some in here for Illustrator as well against Sideshow FX the really nice little icons I've got their Photoshop one and their Final Cut one and then there's some other ones there's that DaVinci Resolve one that I've just installed and you can see it's just appeared in here so let's just pick one of these at random so click on that it's very slow today that's strange that's strange so what's supposed to happen is you just click on these and it just sort of adds them in oh it's done it already it was doing it in the background that's why so if I just click on one of these other ones you can see it's actually changing it there I was expecting this to close down so there you go so that's how you can just choose one of these one of these icons from those packs that you've downloaded so that is that is a way that you can get icons the way that I make all of my icons is actually using Keynote I'll just very briefly show you this because it's super simple really so it won't take me a second to just demonstrate I'm going to open Keynote and I'll just create a completely new document you can do this with PowerPoint as well as I say I've got the Adobe Creative Street Creative Sweet not Creative Street I could just do these all in Illustrator but actually I just find it so simple and easy to create them in Keynote that I figure why not and there's another thing about Keynote which is kind of useful if I just come over here so here I've got Keynote open it's probably a little bit small on the screen it's just a completely blank slide just delete that now the side of the slides as I say this would be the same in PowerPoint as well but come over to the document you'll find that you've got two options here so the slide size is either going to be widescreen 16x9 or standard 4x3 but actually you've got this here custom slide size so all you're going to do in here is just make it a square basically and now the resolution of the the keys on Stream Deck I think is 32 pixels by 32 pixels however just make it any size and it will scale it down so make it I don't know thousand by thousand like that so now you've got a square slide what you could also do is we looked at how you could make like different colored backgrounds on that slide on the the icon generator from Elgato well what we could do is we could actually come over here and just change the the background in the slide master so if I just click out of here this is a bit small actually just come to here I've got this all squished up into a small little space just bear with me a second what I want to do maybe that's a bit smaller right so if I come into this one edit slide layout what you might want to do is where it is you know what's presentation software is like it creates all these different templates of slides that you can go and add in all of your stuff so this is editing the slide master now what you might want to do is just delete all of these and I'll just put that as blank delete all of these like that and we'll just leave a blank one but then perhaps the background color we want of this one is maybe blue you might want to then create another one so duplicate that but I'll make the background color of this one as I don't know red something like that so now we've got a series of different sort of background colors so just use three for example you can make those obviously whatever color you want click on done so that is our slide master done and now if we go and want to create our icon then what we can do is there are a huge number of sort of pictograms already built in to keynote and the same with PowerPoint as well so you may find that if you just come into here and click on shape as well as just general shapes you've also got all of these other different ones in here so if I come down this list all these different pictograms you may find something so for example the one that I use for my home icon if I type in home then it's just got a picture of a house the color of that is happens to be the exact color of the background which is not useful let me just change that a second so we'll make it make it red or yellow these are terrible colors that I'm choosing here aren't they but you get the idea so there we've got a picture of a house maybe we want to create another one which is I don't know for a video call or something like that so what you can do here though is if you click on add slide now it's got these templates which are these sort of backgrounds that we've just created so you might want to have that as a something on a red background click on shape and then let's type in phone old school phone so we've now just created a little phone icon so you can see that it's really easy once you've got this to just go through and create all of these different icons because you just literally going through and adding in a new slide adding a new slide and adding the pictograms obviously you can just drag and drop images so maybe you've got some little transparent background image that you want to use for these maybe the logo for something for an application that you want to use or a website you want to use so you could just drag and drop that in there as well and if I just actually open up my sort of template with all my icons in this one over here so these are all the all the icons that I've created and I'm just creating them in here just in this way and the good thing about this is once you've created a series of slides or a series of icons if you just export those as images so just do file export to and then images and again it would be the same same sort of process with PowerPoint you just select the the slides that you want to export and in this case I've got 540 but you could you know if you just made some new ones you could just export just those as PNG and then click next and it just exports them all as individual files so once you've created them you export in one go and it just creates a whole set of files for you you know one for each icon that you've created one little tip that I'll give here as well is I find that it's good to have a sort of consistent look and feel to them so these for example are ones that I use for my overlays in Ecamm so this is my little way of signifying that it's kind of one layer over the top of another so this would be all of my Ecamm overlays and you can see that they've got a same sort of consistent look and feel to them these ones are for things related to recording live streaming adding a timestamp things like that and you notice that all these sort of sizes of them are consistent and that's one thing from a design point of view just to make sure that you've got a sort of consistent look and feel to them well one way that you can sort of cheat to do that if I come up to one of these ones is if I come and get this for a second I'll just create a new one and then I'll paste this in so what I've got here is if you search for iOS icon template what Apple did when they changed from I forget which version of iOS it was but they went from a point of where they had lots of skeuomorphism in their icon design for the iPhone where the notepad for example looked like a leather bound notepad and everything kind of looked like the physical device that it was meant to represent and at some point they had a complete redesign of the whole iOS system where they wanted to unify the look of all of the icons and so they created this icon template and if you look at all sorry all the iOS icons that Apple create they kind of fall within this template and so you know making sure you don't have anything outside of the bounding box from here this very outside one if you've got any circular elements then it generally fills this large circle smaller circular elements fill this middle one and they use it as basically just a way to lay out icons and use it as a design template really and so I use this when I'm creating my icons as well so that I get a consistent look and feel to them so that they do all well they do all have that sort of consistent look to them so for example here you can see the just to call back to what Keely was saying about the YouTube icon pack this is all the YouTube icons and you can see that basically this fits within that central box this outside circle fits within the outside circle that we saw in the template and it's just got as I say this consistent look these do not fall outside of that very outside boundary and the actual size of them is similar to that central box that was in the template so yeah searching for the iOS icon design template is a great way to do it you can find a sort of transparent version of it usually so this is just a in fact I don't think it is transparent but you can get a I don't know if it's transparent I think but you can get a transparent version of it that just sits over the in the background so I just have that in my slides when I go to create a new one and then use that as the the guideline or the guide to to create them and as I say that is all of the icon packs that are on my website I've just created them in in keynote so it is really easy to to make these and to you know get a consistent look across all of your icons these are just the ones as I say that I use for e-com for for my for when I'm recording and live streaming and things like that so definitely worth having a look at that like I say you can do that with with PowerPoint as well and I just find it's a lot quicker I think you can do it with Canva as well so if you are a Canva user same kind of thing applies it's just a case of creating a square a square template that you're going to use or a square slide that you are going to going to use so let me just have a little look about where we're up to I think I've covered off so that is how to add the the icons I think I've covered off most of the things on here I will just then come on to the sort of productivity uses we've sort of dipped in and out of this but really it comes down to yeah looking at any automation app that you use on your Mac so like keyboard maestro I won't go down into the keyboard maestro rabbit hole but basically keyboard maestro having said that I won't go down into the rabbit hole keyboard maestro is a automation app for the for the Mac and there are similar ones here for for PC as well but this is the one I know how to use on the Mac so keyboard maestro basically is for creating macros and so the way that works is you've got different groupings of macros so you can organize all of your macros but then if we go in and create a new one basically the way it works is you've got a series of triggers so you can have actions that are triggered by you can have macros that are triggered by keyboard shortcuts but you can also have them triggered by a whole load of other things like for example when I'm at the coffee shop Wi-Fi turn off my sensitive network connections or things like that that you don't want transmitting data over an open Wi-Fi you can have it for triggered by time so at a certain time of the day I want it to run a backup or transfer files from one drive to another to do like drive maintenance and things like that so there's all kinds of different triggers that you can have for your macros it could be just when you open a specific app do something so when I open ECAM have it turn off certain things that are going to chew up my bandwidth for example that might be another use case or when you connect to a certain device do things so there's lots of different triggers but in actual fact if you're going to create a macro for keyboard maestro that you're only going to be triggering from stream deck we can actually just leave this completely blank so this is the kind of like the triggering part but then down here is where you can add the action that you want to perform with this macro and I say action but it's actually actions you can have a whole complex series of actions and really this is the area where some people look at keyboard maestro and get a little bit daunted by all that it can do because if I click on new action these are all the different actions that you can perform with it and it's a really a massive long list and in fact is even more than it looks there because there's little sub things that you can do within them so for example you can have it if I do mouse for example that was one we were talking about earlier so move or click are the mouse so I could have it when when I press a button it's going to move the mouse to a specific location and then it's going to click the mouse but I could also have it just actually double click the mouse or triple click I could have it just only move the mouse to that point sometimes you want to move the mouse over something to highlight something on the screen but you could also then if I maybe say click but then maybe I want to actually drag it as well so maybe you want to literally click on something and drag it to somewhere else on the screen so you can drag it and then in terms of where you want to click you can either click on a specific point on the screen or you can click relative to a specific window or you can click on a specific image so down at the bottom here you've got found images center so now what I could do is let's say I wanted to click on let's say that this was the login sign for your particular whatever it was Gmail or whatever we were talking about earlier on let's say that I want to I want to actually when I activate this I wanted to go and click over on like this image obviously I wouldn't do this because it's in keyboard maestro but you get the idea what I could do is I could take a screenshot of that image one second so take a little screenshot of that image just there so I've now grabbed a screenshot of it and then what I could do is I could drag this image now and drop it in there so you can see that it's got a picture of that little image in it so now when I activate this it's going to actually find that image on the screen and it's going to move the mouse over to it so if I click on run it's probably going to confuse itself now because we've got two of the same image on the screen but basically when you run the macro it's going to find the image and click on it and that's actually how I automate the upload of my videos because it opens up a website first of all and we can do that so if you want to go to a URL so open a URL so I could drag that in first so that might be I'm going to go to I'm going to go to I don't know whatever is Gmail or in my case I go to YouTube Studio then I'm going to go to a found image which is the open a sorry upload a video then you have to go through and drag the video onto the the area so you can create a really complex set of a complex chain of actions and just as I mentioned with Stream Deck how it's useful to hello Melvin just noticed you popped in great to see you here yeah just as I mentioned about Stream Deck the way to go about it is rather than necessarily try and plan absolutely everything out for the beginning obviously if you're if you're doing a show on e-cam or something and you want to have specific scenes then yeah you need to plan that out but when it comes to productivity and all of the things that you can use that for just sort of build this up over time as you realize the stuff you do over and over again and that's the same with keyboard maestro is look for the things that you're doing these repetitive tasks that you're doing over and over again that rather than you go through all these steps you could just press a button and it would just do it all for you and then break down that into logical steps of what it is you're doing and then that's how you would go through and program it in here but as I say it can be a bit daunting to look at everything that it can do so rather than look at the whole scope of everything it can do it's rather a case of just thinking like knowing that it can probably do whatever it is that you want to do and then just look for those things that you need to automate and then figure out how to do it as opposed to going in and trying to take it all in because there's really quite a lot in there to take in but in any case that is basically what keyboard maestro is is allowing you to create a chain of actions building them into macros and then trigger them from either these triggers like keyboard shortcuts or from other events that happen but as I say the real beauty of this is we can actually just trigger it with the stream deck and the way that you do that is we just use this plugin that is called KMlink as I say there is a one if you search in the store then if I come over to the store and I'll go to discover sorry two plugins then there is here if I search for keyboard maestro there is a keyboard maestro plugin so there you go there is that one keyboard maestro and it's by stairway software who make keyboard maestro so what that is for is triggering a macro and keyboard maestro but also going the other way and triggering stuff in stream deck I find though that this KMlink is actually a much more streamlined way to do it so I've got both but I tend to use KMlink and the way KMlink works is if I come over to the plugins and then I'll come to custom and then here you've just got this KMlink drag this onto here and all you're going to do is just select the macro from the drop down list at the bottom like this and then you can just select that was the one that I just created so if I was to press that now it would go and basically do whatever we're told it to do go move the mouse over to that that particular point on the screen so that's where the stream deck really just becomes as I mentioned in the description and in the trailer it's kind of like the ultimate productivity tool because it gives you access to all of these things that you can do with keyboard maestro and whilst keyboard maestro obviously we could do all of this before with keystrokes but one of the sticking points with keyboard maestro is actually building up that muscle memory and remembering what the keyboard shortcut is and whilst yes you know you can go through a process to try and commit these things to memory if you're having difficulty you know remembering all these keyboard shortcuts you've made there is no real way to go and remember them except maybe go and you know write them down or open keyboard maestro the beauty of stream deck is you've got a button with an icon on it that's hopefully you know you've created it's a descriptive of what it does or at least it actually says it so rather than having to try and remember the keyboard shortcut or go and hunt for it written down somewhere you can literally just look at the stream deck and see it and it's so I found that it's been it's really opened opened keyboard maestro up more to be a lot more accessible to be able to just trigger things with the touch of a button I should mention though if you are not using keyboard maestro but you're using shortcuts so Mac OS shortcuts which has been on Mac since Monterey if I come over here one second where is it this one there is also a plug-in for shortcuts and that is called there you go cunningly it's called shortcuts it's made by I forget the name of the the chap now it's not made by Apple it's a third party but it's really good and it's exactly the same process you just drag and drop this single action on and then you just go and pick out your your actual shortcuts I've got videos on both of these by the way on my channel so here you just go and pick out a particular shortcut from your list of shortcuts so yeah it's really easy to use and again you can just use that to trigger all of the the things that you've got on your computer all the shortcuts you've got I should say on your computer now there is another side to this just bear with me one second though I'll just quickly check in Melvin what are you asking is there a window mover shortcut or app to allow you to press a stream deck button to open a series of windows that you need there certainly is now I use an application called Moom M double O M and what that allows you to do is first of all you can do window management with that where you can you know click and it will just move a window to a particular point on the screen but what you can also do is you can create snapshots so specific layouts that you've got of your screen and then when you press a keyboard shortcut it will actually arrange all of those windows into one place I've got a video about that on the channel as well but it's a little bit hard to to kind of demo it actually because it relies on me having all the right windows open so if I show you for example what I've got open on my my computer right now not that one I'll tell you where it's because I've got ecom live on the wrong window let me move ecom over here for a second there you go so this is my my desktop as it is at the moment it's a 4k 43 inch display so I've got stuff all spread out all over the place but Moom basically just sits in if I come into here do you know what Moom doesn't won't let me show it whilst I'm in live demo mode that is frustrating okay so basically what you do with Moom though is it actually sits in the the little green dots on your you know you've got the red the yellow the maximise minimise well it's kind of like an extension of that but for some reason in live demo mode in ecom it doesn't pop up which is annoying but what you can do is you can save a snapshot so I could say right well I want my windows all laid out like that on the screen and I save that as a snapshot and then I can use a keyboard shortcut to basically put everything back in that position so in terms of your question then is there a mover a window mover shortcut or app to allow you to press a stream deck button and open a series of windows that you need there are a couple of approaches here if you don't use the stream deck what you could do is in the if you don't use keyboard maestro I beg your pardon in stream deck what you could do is create a multi-action so let's have a look at how to do it you could create a multi-action to open all of those applications let's go through and do this so you would come in here just right click on any empty space create multi-action and then you double click in it to go into there and then what you do is you would use the system and the open command and you could open whatever applications you needed to open so let me just say you're going to open four different applications so there you just go and choose here choose the specific application I won't go through through and add them all in but let's just take one for an example so here's my list of apps let's say I'm going to open whatever it is take one random calculator so you're going to go through and open all those apps and then all you would simply do is you would use the hot key and then let's say you had assigned a hot key because you can do this in Moom you would assign a hot key for that particular layout as whatever it was I don't know something like that so then it's going to open all those apps and then it's going to press the hot key for Moom to make it arrange them all into those places that is exactly what I do with the different things that I do on my Mac I have hot keys assigned to or buttons assigned to all of these different things one thing that I do though is I actually do the opening part in keyboard maestro I do all of this kind of stuff in keyboard maestro I find it's more efficient and it's just the way that I do things so I would just rather than open the apps in Stream Deck itself I would tend to have it all wrapped up in a single macro and keyboard maestro and do it that way but this is how you would do it with multi-actions one thing to bear in mind if you're doing something like this is obviously when you open an app there may be some time required to actually open the app so it's always best to actually add in a delay and you can come in here to where is it Stream Deck and then you'll notice that we've got this one called delay so what you want to do is just drag this and drop it between opening all the apps and then triggering that shortcut to move them all because the yeah as I say you just need to give the apps time to open up properly and open up all their windows now when you add in a delay you'll see down here it says delay in and the delay is in milliseconds so that being 1000 being one second so let's say you want to just give it I don't know depending on how how quickly your apps open up you might have to just play around with this to just get it exactly right but better to be on the side of caution if you don't mind waiting three seconds maybe make that 3000 milliseconds and then what's going to happen is when you press the button it's going to open those four apps all in all in a row and then it's going to trigger the moon shortcut for for doing that let me just quickly grab the link for moon since we're talking about it there are a couple of other apps that do this but moon I have found to be the best because of the snapshot feature there seems to be some overlapping between some of these features on different applications so there's one called magnet as well which is to move apps into different locations but it doesn't have the same snapshot feature but I've just dropped the link to moon in the in the chat so whilst we're talking about delay though what you'll notice is when you come on to any of these actions as well as having the title and the app or you know whatever is the details about it there's you'll see that there's this little timer here and it says customize delays this one could be potentially a source of confusion if you are trying to add a delay between actions because you might well think that oh well this is this is delay so let me add that in so let me just explain what this is this was something that was added in the the last version I think the last software update for stream deck and it says custom action delays and we've actually got two previously there was always a built-in delay between actions so for example if you open one app it was always going to wait 200 milliseconds I think it was between going on to the next one so it's not actually going to trigger all of these things exactly at once there's always a sort of little built-in delay into it this delay that we've added in this one where we've physically added an action in that's called delay there you can make the delay whatever you want so from you know one millisecond all the way up to you know an hour if you want or more so as long as you enter the time in milliseconds you can make this really whatever you want you could make it a day I guess and it would just sit there counting down for you but this this built-in delay then here as I say this was just a stock 200 milliseconds whether you liked it or not there was always a 200 millisecond delay in between this chain of actions and some people said right well actually we want to try and reduce that and an example would be like if I've got a like a a stinger overlay on a transition on a live stream where you know I want to switch scenes but then I've got this thing that comes over the top of the scene as well at the same time then I would maybe want those things all to happen at the same time and so what they added in is this custom action delays and this first one here is basically simulating you can see it's got a picture of a button going down and coming up maybe you can't see it for some reason my little my little zoom thing is not quite oh there it is so this this first one it's basically simulating what is the amount of time between you pressing the button and releasing it again so if you think about when you are pressing a key on on a keyboard sometimes if you were to just try and do it too quickly it wouldn't even register that you'd pressed it and this is the reason why they had this 200 millisecond delay in originally because they wanted to make it full proof basically so that it would always trigger but if you've got something where it could actually be triggered really quickly then you can actually move this slider down from 100 milliseconds all the way down to one so you know effectively just one thousandth of a second they've also then got a delay built in between one thing happening and another because if you I suppose it's a bit like if you try and press two keys on a typewriter do people still you do that at the same time then they'll kind of like get jammed so this was trying to work in some that's a bit of a bad analogy isn't it for a tech channel but this was a the second one here is the time between the first and the second action or between two concurrent actions so leaving a little bit of a space between them and again this was always 100 milliseconds before so the combination of the both of these is 200 milliseconds so if you find that you've got something where you think really I need these actions to be much tighter together then you could consider tweaking these but just be careful because if you make these too low you might find that it causes issues and the thing doesn't trigger right so I'm only explaining all of this because if you saw this delay you might think that that's the way that you're supposed to control the delay between two actions whereas in actual fact the real way to add delay is to use this delay feature and this is really only if you are doing something where you're finding that they're at this this you know point two of a second is just too long for you to wait in the actions this is where you've got the fine control over it and as I say it's the first one is the time of the actual press of the imaginary press of whatever button it is and the second one here is the time between that imaginary press and then you going on to the next one so that is just to explain what that is there so hello there Ice Boy Nash Godfrey great to see you and you're welcome so let me have a little look so your local tyre center I want to press one button on the stream streamdecker streamdeck to automate sending an email to a specific a specific address you certainly can book time anytime yeah so I can add a little link into that so yeah I do do consultations obviously and there it is takeonetech.io slash consultation but let me just try and answer the question though shall I because you want to press one button on the streamdeck to automate sending an email to a specific address that's an interesting one actually because let's try that because what we can do is if I create a multi-action we'll give this a go create new multi-action so the first thing we want to do in this sense is we want to create a new email I'm going to assume you're using mail.app you could do this if you're using Gmail if we're using Gmail then the first step would be to obviously open Gmail so in that case you would go to a website and you could add in Gmail but what I'm going to do is I'm going to open mail.app so there would go for choose and we go to mail.app so if I search for mail somewhere in here okay now I say open this open command actually if you have got if you've got the application is already open what this does is it actually brings the app to the front so it's kind of open or actually activate as well he says nearly knocking over his water so we're activating mail then what we do is command n would create a new email so what we could do then is you might want to add a delay in as well because as we've mentioned if mail wasn't open maybe you want to add a couple of seconds in there two three seconds just to give it time to open then we're going to use hotkey so the hotkey would be command n to create a new mail and then you are wanting to basically when you create a new mail let me just check this up a second oh sorry thank you very much I'm just getting some very helpful thing turn off the comment that helps so what I want to do here is thanks rich if I create a new email yeah so when you create a new email it's going to go into the two field to begin with so when you've created a new email then what we're going to do is we want to add in then now do you oh yeah then you would type in text because that's the one that's going to trigger typing in a string of text so then you would put in in this case you want to send to a specific a specific address so then you would type in whatever the email address was like that and then that would then paste that would effectively type that into that field then what you do is you would then want to go and tab into the presumably the I don't know if you'd want to even add in a subject so if you wanted to add in a subject then you'd need to tab twice so we'll add in a hotkey and the hotkey we'll put is tab how can we do it in here might have to search for the drop down so there we've got the tab then you would want to actually tab again because I think tab goes to cc and then tab would go to the subject so then you would do that again hotkey and then just click the drop down and go tab and then that would take you to the the subject line then so if you've got a stock subject that you're going to put in every time you would then do another text one so if you want a specific subject and then you would do hotkey to tab again and that would take you into the body and then you could then maybe if it's always to the same person if this is what this is for then you would do text and you go hi Chris and then return return like that and then so that basically that sequence now if I were to press that what that should do is if I just press that button where did I put that now which one of those was it it was not that one this is why you should always name your that was the one there so this was the the male one let's try this let's see if this is going to work I probably have not put enough of a delay in but it's done it so that is just opened up that email it's typed in email to it jumped over type the subject in and then started the email so so that is how you could you could do that with with that I've got lots of things for these for similar for that I do with keyboard maestro for specifically for email stuff as well so that would be the way that you would you would do that so so yeah that's that one is open an email then press stream deck button for gmails yeah so you could you could do it in gmail gmail as well and it just be with all these things it's just a case of breaking it down in terms of what is the sequence of events