10/31/2023 – BuiltOnAir Live Podcast Full Show – S16-E05

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In This Episode

Welcome to the BuiltOnAir Podcast, the live show.  The BuiltOnAir Podcast is a live weekly show highlighting everything happening in the Airtable world.

Check us out at BuiltOnAir.com. Join our community, join our Slack Channel, and meet your fellow Airtable fans.

Kamille Parks – I am an Airtable Community Forums Leader and the developer behind the custom Airtable app “Scheduler”, one of the winning projects in the Airtable Custom Blocks Contest now widely available on the Marketplace. I focus on building simple scripts, automations, and custom apps for Airtable that streamline data entry and everyday workflows.

Dan Fellars – I am the Founder of Openside, On2Air, and BuiltOnAir. I love automation and software. When not coding the next feature of On2Air, I love spending time with my wife and kids and golfing.

Scott Rose – Scott Rose is an expert Airtable consultant, a Certified FileMaker Developer, and a Registered Integromat Partner with 30 years of database development experience. Scott is the Chief Geek Officer of ScottWorld.com, where he has built a career developing world-class database systems for businesses. Scott is also a member of MENSA International (the high IQ society) and is an accomplished public speaker. In the early 2000’s, Scott traveled around the country for 6 years with Steve Jobs & the Apple Executive Team as one of Apple’s top professional speakers. Scott spoke at all of Apple’s major events & retail store openings, where he introduced many of Apple’s new products to the public for the very first time. In his free time, Scott gives motivational & inspirational talks at conferences around the globe.

Show Segments

Round The Bases – 00:01:40 –

Meet the Experts – 00:01:41 –

Meet Mecca Parker from Park West Digital.

Founder & CEO @ Park West Digital

Visit them online

Automate Create – –

Watch as we review and work through automations. Weston is a database management tool that helps Airtable consultants win more client projects without heavily investing development time and resources up front. Weston turns system requirements into a functioning proof-of-concept with the click of a button so that consultants can save costs on business development and close deals more deals, more quickly. It was built almost 100% without code using Airtable and ChatGPT

Learn more about the automation

An App a Day – 00:01:42 –

Watch as we install, explore, and showcase the Mac Controls & Mobile Alerts App from the Airtable Marketplace. The app is described as “Scott demonstrates how to control your Mac from Airtable as well as how to send actual alert-style notifications from Airtable to your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, or Android.”.

Full Segment Details

Segment: Round The Bases

Start Time: 00:01:40

Roundup of what’s happening in the Airtable communities – Airtable, BuiltOnAir, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Segment: Meet the Experts

Start Time: 00:01:41

Mecca Parker –

Meet Mecca Parker from Park West Digital.

Founder & CEO @ Park West Digital

Visit them online

Segment: Automate Create

Start Time:

Airtable Automations – Weston

Watch as we review and work through automations. Weston is a database management tool that helps Airtable consultants win more client projects without heavily investing development time and resources up front. Weston turns system requirements into a functioning proof-of-concept with the click of a button so that consultants can save costs on business development and close deals more deals, more quickly. It was built almost 100% without code using Airtable and ChatGPT

Learn more about the automation

Segment: An App a Day

Start Time: 00:01:42

Airtable App Showcase – Mac Controls & Mobile Alerts – Scott demonstrates how to control your Mac from Airtable as well as how to send actual alert-style notifications from Airtable to your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, or Android.

Watch as we install, explore, and showcase the Mac Controls & Mobile Alerts App from the Airtable Marketplace. The app is described as “Scott demonstrates how to control your Mac from Airtable as well as how to send actual alert-style notifications from Airtable to your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, or Android.”.

Full Transcription

The full transcription for the show can be found here:

S16:E05
===

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to the Built On Air podcast, the variety show for all things Airtable. In each episode, we cover four different segments. It's always fresh and different and lots of fun while you get the insider info on all things Airtable. Our hosts and guests are some of the most senior experts in the Airtable community.

[00:00:26] Join us live each week on our YouTube channel every Tuesday at 11 a. m. Eastern. And join our active community at BuiltOnAir. com. Before we begin, a word from our sponsor, On2Air Backups. On2Air Backups provides automated Airtable backups to your cloud storage for secure and reliable data protection.

[00:00:43] Prevent data loss and set up a secure Airtable backup system with On2Air Backups at On2Air com. As one customer, Sarah, said, having automated Airtable backups has freed up hours of my time every other week. And the fear of losing anything. Long time customer [00:01:00] David states, On2Air Backups might be the most critical piece of the puzzle to guard against unforeseeable disaster.

[00:01:06] It's easy to set up, and it just works. Join Sarah, David, and hundreds more Airtable users like you to protect your Airtable data with On2Air backups. Sign up today with... Promo code built on air for a 10% discount. Check them out at on2air.com. And now let's check out today's episode and see what we built on air.

[00:01:38] Dan: All right. Welcome to the Built On Air Podcast. We are in season 16, episode five, and one of us got the memo that today's Halloween . 

[00:01:47] Scott: Kamille, you look 

[00:01:49] great.

[00:01:50] Kamille, what are you today? Are you a bride? 

[00:01:55] Kamille: Yeah, sure. 

[00:01:58] Dan: Let's go with that. [00:02:00] So we have with us Kamille and Scott Rose. Allie is out. Allie had a baby a few days ago. So congratulations to Allie. 

[00:02:10] Scott: Congratulations, 

[00:02:11] Dan: Allie. Yep, I don't know if she's watching. She hopefully is getting some sleep. And we will get her when she is back ready for that.

[00:02:21] But in the meantime, we've got Scott with us. Welcome back, as always, Scott. Thank 

[00:02:25] Scott: you so much. I'm excited to be here. 

[00:02:27] Dan: And then we have a special guest, Mecca Parker. Good to have you on, Mecca. 

[00:02:32] Mecca: Awesome. I'm glad to be here as well. 

[00:02:34] Dan: Very good. We'll learn more about Mecca and his story. Coming on in the show.

[00:02:39] So I'll walk us through what we're going to be talking about today. We always, the built on air podcast is an hour long episode where we will talk about everything Airtable. We start with our round the bases to go through all the communities and what's new, and then a shout out to our sponsor back onto our [00:03:00] backups.

[00:03:00] And then we'll dive into Mecca's background and story and learn about him. And then Mecca will then be showing a base and automations that he's built using ChatGPT and Airtable calls it Westin and we'll learn about that and then shout out to join our community and then we will finish up with some cool tricks and techniques that Scott will share with us.

[00:03:25] And how to get mobile alerts and Mac controlling your, your Mac all through Airtable. 

[00:03:32] SEGMENT: ROUND THE BASES -- 00:03:32 So with that, we will start with our round the bases. It was a pretty quiet week. We don't have a ton of things to highlight, but there was, I think this was a false. Positive with, with new workspace designs. Somebody pointed out this.[00:04:00] 

[00:04:00] This tweet, but as far as it appears, this was just this highlighting the same things, right? There wasn't any changes to the homepage, was there? This last week, not that I 

[00:04:13] Kamille: noticed 

[00:04:16] Dan: somebody that actually finally went to their homepage after months, 

[00:04:22] Kamille: like me, I'm very rarely on my homepage. And so they've, they've probably been using the command K shortcut to get everywhere.

[00:04:29] And then. Accidentally clicked home and I was like, Oh, everything is 

[00:04:33] Scott: different. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I had also forgotten that how poorly redesigned the workspaces were when a client of mine was trying to share interfaces with people who didn't have access to the workspace. You can't actually easily get to things that have been shared with you unless you go to where it says home and then you click on that little drop down in the middle that says create a date and you choose shared with me.

[00:04:58] So it's very [00:05:00] hidden. The way to get to things that are shared with you. Now, I mean, this is not new either. This has been this way for the last six months, but I forgot how poorly designed it was to get to stuff that's shared with you actually 

[00:05:14] Dan: show me where that is. Because actually, I was looking for 

[00:05:16] Scott: that.

[00:05:18] It's okay. See where it says open by you. Click there. Shared with you right there. That's The only way you can get this stuff, if you haven't been shared with the, if the whole workspace wasn't shared with you, if they just shared one base with you, or if they just shared an interface with you, it's not going to show up anywhere in the left hand side, unless you star the things.

[00:05:43] It will it shows up over there. Yeah, that's 

[00:05:47] Kamille: what that is. 

[00:05:50] Mecca: It's kind of annoying about it, though, is that when you come back, I think it saves that as like the setting next time you come back to your home screen. So sometimes I'll think I'm looking for a base in that [00:06:00] list and it just disappear and I'm like, did my Airtable just crash on me and destroy all my data?

[00:06:05] But You have to make sure you go back and, you know, turn it off if you want to see your bases versus, you know, the ones that are shared with you. So, yeah. 

[00:06:13] Scott: Oh, that's good to know. That is good to know. So always, so I guess the lesson is always pay attention to that little drop down there. 

[00:06:21] Mecca: Yeah. Very inconspicuous drop down.

[00:06:25] Scott: Not great. 

[00:06:27] Dan: Yeah. I was hoping, I think I had a hope that maybe they did. I think Airtable even admitted that it's still a work in progress, although we haven't seen since the initial push of the new home screen, I don't feel like they've made any updates to it since then. Yeah. Even though I feel like they got plenty of feedback that they're still going 

[00:06:49] Scott: for improvement.

[00:06:50] Kamille: Yeah, this one I think was almost universally pushed back against yeah, no changes that [00:07:00] I have noticed since it launched. 

[00:07:03] Scott: Yeah.

[00:07:06] Mecca: And, let's 

[00:07:09] Dan: see what's he saying here. If you click into view workspace, you can filter sort. Yeah, I think that's always been there. So, alright, nothing new there. But hopefully, hopefully someday we'll, we'll have more improvements on the home screen. 

[00:07:27] Scott: Yes, fingers crossed. 

[00:07:30] Dan: Yeah. Alright, here's one coming from Reddit.

[00:07:35] Talking about how to contact. Airtable. So apparently there's a requirement that this person has for needing to have a name and a contact info, phone number and email for somebody for support in order to get it through their, their vendor approval process at their business. And so it was trying to find contact info for [00:08:00] Airtable.

[00:08:00] So if you're in this case, like this person was literally like having to potentially. Go with a different vendor because they couldn't find a phone number. So we know Airtable is hard to find, hard to get in hold of if you're not enterprise for sure, but anyways, if you need a phone number, somebody did some sleuthing and found a phone number that you can put.

[00:08:21] Scott: Oh, wow. Nice. 

[00:08:24] Dan: And it's not this one. Don't put Jenny eight, six, seven.

[00:08:30] Scott: What is that number? I'm going to, I'm going to write it down. And 

[00:08:34] Dan: they found it 415 200 2040. I think it's just... 

[00:08:42] Mecca: Good stuff. What if he picks up that phone? Like... Yeah. How he, how he picks it up. 

[00:08:50] Scott: Wouldn't that be great? 

[00:08:53] Mecca: Yeah. You should let Scott just give him all of his... Opinion on what should be a better, [00:09:00] 

[00:09:00] Scott: you know, just one short phone call.

[00:09:06] Dan: Very good. Another one. This one I thought was interesting. So the question is they, they, they have a formula field. I'm assuming that generates the link to a form that has all the pre fill URLs. And obviously that's a huge form. If you have a lot of fields that you're pre filling. And they're trying to figure out how to how to shorten it.

[00:09:34] And maybe use like a shortening API or something to do that. But the reason why I pulled this one up is is the idea of using a button field and actually like inserting that button into. And email and I've never used that trick. I don't know if you guys have ever like actually [00:10:00] inserted a button field into an email.

[00:10:02] Does it actually display as a button in the email that goes out? I wondered if that's actually what they're talking about. My 

[00:10:11] Kamille: suspicion. Is no, well, if you do insert record display as list and only include the button, then it should look like a button. I don't know if it will be clickable if you're inserting just a variable of the record, like field by field that it's going to give you the option of what part of the button do you want to insert?

[00:10:37] Probably the URL. Maybe also the color, but that's just going to be a URL. So not looking like a button, but certainly clickable. So I can do a test off screen. 

[00:10:49] Scott: I think Kamille's right because somebody posted in the Airtable community forum about this very thing. They said, I inserted the button field into my emails, but it's not clickable.

[00:10:59] What do I do? [00:11:00] Well, there you go. But what Kamille said is, yeah, you change it to show the URL from the button, but then it doesn't show the button. It's just a link. 

[00:11:11] Dan: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I guess it says it shows up a nice hyperlink in emails. But that would imply it's clickable if it's a hyperlink. Anyways, I thought that was curious.

[00:11:24] I've never, I've never tried to insert a button field into an email automation.

[00:11:32] Scott: Could you do your own custom HTML code in the Airtable send emails? Or do they not allow HTML in their automations? You can. Oh, okay. 

[00:11:43] Kamille: I, well, I'm pretty sure you can, 

[00:11:46] Dan: they, they do support H TM L but it might not be all HTML, so I don't know if how that works with buttons. Mm-Hmm. 

[00:11:57] Kamille: it, it'll, it will be strange if you, if you can [00:12:00] put it in there, it's not gonna be like exactly what you want, because there's a bunch of other things in Airtable emails because they're formatted.

[00:12:10] And I just did an email with a button in it, it's, it just inserts the URL, it doesn't look like a button or anything. 

[00:12:19] Scott: Oh, cool. So it actually knows what people want, which is I mean, which is they want something that's clickable. 

[00:12:28] Kamille: Well, yes. Let me do one other thing. We can move on. 

[00:12:33] Scott: I wonder what that guy was talking about in that post where he said it looks like a button, but it's not clickable.

[00:12:38] Maybe that's in a grid view or something. I'm not sure. Yeah. 

[00:12:43] Dan: Anyways. Yeah, that's that's one way to do it. All right. Next one. So this, this is kind of like a, an overarching theme. This comes from the table forums, air. tableforums. com. [00:13:00] Scott Rose is very active there and runs that one. But anyways, there's a lot of, if you had any issues with Zapier in particular in the last week, although this one is, is not specific to Zapier, but there was a lot of issues with Zapier.

[00:13:19] So there was an added outage. I like that. Zapier says it was a small subset of Airtable. It's connected from if you look at the Facebook community. Lots of people dealing with with this issue. 14 comments there. And I know in the built on air, it was brought up. So major outage. They did fix it and supposedly got everything through. So if you if you were dealing with some Zapier pain, you're not alone.[00:14:00] 

[00:14:01] It really is a bigger issue because I know being a developer using having implemented Airtable's OAuth is, I've pleaded for this in the past, but Airtable needs to improve this. It's super sensitive. It will kill your authentication way too easily. It's not, it's not built the same way that other OAuth providers are.

[00:14:25] And so I've pleaded with them in the past. They haven't been willing to, to improve, although they have made improvements, I will say, but it looks like recently we've had experiences where our connections, it was stable for months. And then this last, like, two to three weeks, it's, it's become unstable again.

[00:14:43] So I don't know if they're making changes, but I'm seeing this more and more people complaining about it. I 

[00:14:51] Mecca: wonder if this is also affecting make because I was having some weird things happen with some of my scenarios last, last week where, you know, it would [00:15:00] basically kind of like act like it didn't have the connection there.

[00:15:02] And so I had to essentially, I couldn't even reconnect the same connection. I had to delete the module. Add the module again and start from scratch to, to get it to work. I didn't know if that was something I was doing wrong, but it sounds like if there's a lot of issues other than other apps, you know, maybe it's connected, but I don't know if anybody's seen anything similar.

[00:15:25] Scott: I haven't seen that in the last week with make interesting. So I'm not sure. I did 

[00:15:32] Kamille: have multiple make scenarios. Stop themselves after trying to run because they were no longer properly authenticated. They were still on the old API key rather than a personal access token. And that's loosely related to this issue, it's the same switch.

[00:15:53] Mecca: Yeah. I'm using both a lot and PATs in some, in some places. I don't know if there's, I don't know what the best [00:16:00] practice for that is. Probably personal access tokens is probably better, but I don't know. Easier to develop with for sure. Yeah. Change that. Accounts and when something changes, we have to switch out a module or switch out a connection.

[00:16:14] Scott: Yeah, I've been using personal access tokens as much as possible because of all these off issues. That's the sole reason I've been, I've been using them so much. 

[00:16:24] Kamille: I do like having specifically defined scopes for each token. So I don't have to worry about like accidentally triggering a bunch of things and several different bases when it's only supposed to trigger in one, you know, I don't have a better control of returning certain pieces of the workflow off.

[00:16:45] Dan: Yeah. 

[00:16:45] Mecca: Right. I got one 

[00:16:47] Dan: from Drew. Now when's the deadline? February of when the old tokens are officially dead. 

[00:16:55] Scott: Yeah, the old API keys. The old API keys. Yeah, [00:17:00] February 1st, I guess. 

[00:17:01] Dan: Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how bad a day that is because I'm sure there's still tools using it. 

[00:17:10] Scott: Everybody clear your schedule on February 1st.

[00:17:12] Yeah. 

[00:17:15] Dan: Yeah, on our end, like we've supported OAuth, but we still have legacy clients that we probably need to still encourage to upgrade. All right, keeping on Zapier. So this comes from Automation Ace, a consultant in Airtable, saying that the Zap, the Airtable Zap connector now supports upsert meaning you can either update or insert.

[00:17:46] And I feel like that this was already there, but maybe, maybe this is new. It was there for make. Yeah. I know that [00:18:00] Airtable modified their API to support this a few months ago, maybe, I don't know how many months ago, but but yeah, so now Zapier is supporting it. So it's kind of a cool. Onto where, when we did have a Zapier connector that did, this is probably the first to support this feature.

[00:18:20] But It's good to see Airtable's catching up. 

[00:18:25] Scott: That's right, you were ahead of the game. Yeah, 

[00:18:27] Dan: we were. 

[00:18:29] Kamille: Yeah, and sooner or later Airtable might make their own absurd you know, step in their own automations. Yeah, now that it's seeing their A. P. I. Strange. It's 

[00:18:42] Scott: not there. Yep. 

[00:18:46] Mecca: Yep. 

[00:18:48] Dan: So if you're using Zapier, check out the new feature there.

[00:18:53] Okay, last one. Does anybody feel this pain? Airtable live refreshes driving you insane [00:19:00] when it's moving when the records are moving? Because if you have them grouped by you change. Or I think he actually has like automations running that are changing it. 

[00:19:14] Mecca: That's funny. 

[00:19:15] Dan: I don't know if you've ever experienced this.

[00:19:18] Kamille: Not to this degree because it, it, that has to be an automation doing that. But it is, groups are very helpful. But I hate having a thousand views in one table. And so I find myself making groups temporary temporarily and then removing them when. You know, I'm done with that because they are, it's somewhat frustrating moving records in between groups and not being able to move records between groups.

[00:19:50] So, you know, it's nice that they're there, but yeah, stuff like this does happen where it's sometimes annoying. [00:20:00] 

[00:20:02] Dan: It is cool. I mean, Airtable, like, this is probably like one of the first things they had working is kind of this live updating where when you change the status and it moves from one group to another, it kind of stays there, which is cool.

[00:20:17] So it doesn't automatically switch on you, but then you've You see the movement of it changing. I think that was one of those like, Oh wow, this is cool. 

[00:20:26] Scott: Yeah, that was one of my first aha moments with Airtable because I came from the world of FileMaker, which doesn't do it as elegantly as this. And it's, it takes a while to set up and it's not live.

[00:20:39] And I was like, Oh my gosh, this is so easy in Airtable and it's live. Yeah. 

[00:20:45] Dan: So very cool. All right, that's it for updates this week. If you can find any, any, maybe any feature announcements or anything. I think last week we teased a feature announcement. Apparently [00:21:00] that's still on hold. I didn't, I didn't go live.

[00:21:02] So should still be coming some more announcements from Airtable. Let's move on. 

[00:21:08] SEGMENT: ON2AIR BACKUPS HIGHLIGHT -- 00:21:10 Quick shout out to On2Air our primary sponsor. On2Air is focused on being the backup solution for your Airtable needs. If your data is important to you, you should be backing it up outside of Airtable and On2Air is the premium solution for that.

[00:21:27] Check us out at On2Air. com. Quick shout out Sarah from LKF Marketing says, Having automated backups has freed up four hours of my time every other week and the fear of losing anything. To me, On2Air and Airtable are the same thing and On2Air just makes it work. So check us out at On2Air com. You can use BuiltOnAir as a discount.

[00:21:52] So check it out, make sure your data is safe and backed up outside of Airtable. 

[00:21:58] All right, [00:22:00] let's learn about Mecca. 

[00:22:03] SEGMENT: MEET THE EXPERTS -- 00:22:05 

[00:22:05] Kamille: Hello, Mecca, and welcome to the 

[00:22:07] Dan: show. 

[00:22:08] Mecca: Hey, Kamille, thank you so much. 

[00:22:11] Scott: So, 

[00:22:12] Kamille: Mecca, I take it that you're a fan of 

[00:22:15] Scott: Airtable. 

[00:22:17] Mecca: Long time fan now. I mean, maybe not as long as people like Dan, but got a couple years of Airtable under my belt by now, so, starting to figure it out, hopefully, 

[00:22:28] Kamille: by now.

[00:22:28] What was the first thing that you built in Airtable, and How did it, you know, either improve or help you think differently about whatever you were building at the time? 

[00:22:41] Mecca: Yeah. So my experience with Airtable actually came from my first job out of college. I was working in management consulting at Accenture and we using it on our on one of our accounts.

[00:22:55] It was actually Disney. So I was working at Disney studio lab in Glendale, which was like [00:23:00] one of the coolest experiences I had had right after, you know. Right after school and using Airtable for PM to manage PM also project management office, keep all of our portfolio projects you know, in a clean list view that we could create a status updates for and kind of review on a daily basis and just keep things working in terms of the day to day workflows.

[00:23:22] I didn't build that system, but that was where I got my feet wet and I kind of started seeing, you know, spreadsheets can't do nearly a quarter of the things that I could do with this Airtable base. So. I got assigned to a project within that within that account to where I was essentially managing a development team for Disney, where we were trying to build this app that would allow us to store store these 3D model locations around the earth, film production teams could instead of having to go to each new location all around [00:24:00] the world every time they wanted to scout it for, you know, to look at that place to film there.

[00:24:05] They would just upload the model one time with, you know, using drone footage model would create a, you know, a three D image that someone could access anywhere in the world. So they would have to go back there every time they wanted to see that location and prospect elevation. So the development team that we were running was building that tool.

[00:24:22] And so since we were using Airtable for PMO, we just decided to build our product backlog all the feature requests and everything within that same Airtable, well actually it was a new Airtable base, but within that same, you know, Airtable ecosystem. So, you know, everything from gathering requirements to figuring out the level of effort for all of the different work requests, all that was taken care of in Airtable.

[00:24:47] And that was really where I started just seeing how powerful it could be, even though at that point it was really just a spreadsheet. It just looked a little bit better. Had a lot of projects after that where I just kind of slowly built on [00:25:00] my skills and started trying new things. And, you know, as a, as a tool developed, I just got better and better at using it until I am here where I am today.

[00:25:09] Kamille: That's really cool. I think a lot of our guests were looking for a particular tool and happened to find Airtable themselves, but you were in a position where it was already implemented and you like, like put in the hours to become an expert in it yourself. 

[00:25:28] Mecca: Yeah, it was, it was kind of forced on me, but you know, back, I'm glad it was forced on me because it's definitely changed my life in a lot of different ways.

[00:25:36] So yeah, it was a really cool experience getting that first project out of, out of Accenture. So, 

[00:25:43] Kamille: well, that's how a lot, I think a lot of people learn is you, you, you don't put in as much until you have to. And so weeds that that's how you learn. 

[00:25:56] Mecca: Yeah. Kind of, you know. Get thrown into the fire and hope you [00:26:00] make it out.

[00:26:00] That's kind of was my experience. So I'm sure it's like that for a lot of people. 

[00:26:04] Kamille: Well, now that you've been in the fire, what's something that you've built more recently? 

[00:26:11] Mecca: So one tool that I've built and I'm, and the reason why I built it is I'm always thinking about just how to do what I do better. So the tool that I, you know, that I built that kind of helps me do that is a tool called Westin.

[00:26:24] It's a platform that it's not really a product yet. It's more so just a proof of concept tool right now, but I wanted to see how I could use, you know, this whole AI way, large language models to streamline what I do create, you know, better deliverables for what, you know, air cable consultants are delivering to their clients.

[00:26:45] And just help myself close more deals faster. And so the tool that I built was, like I said, it's called and the, the main functionality of it right now is to kickstart the proof of concept building process for [00:27:00] clients. By taking the, you know, client requirements that our consultants gathered through consultations and kind of the requirements gathering stage and essentially inject that into a large language model that would create the first version of that database and have that database tracked in, you know, whatever operations system that you use, you know, we use Airtable for that as well.

[00:27:22] So, you know, once it's created, that proof of concept is created with that initial opportunity. You know, we can continue to develop it iterate on it. Yeah. Within the same system. So like I said, the idea is let's get to the point of a proof of concept faster so that, you know, our clients can develop the business case they need to be able to get support for the project and then have that proof of concept tracked and continually iterated upon without having to jump across a bunch of systems.

[00:27:51] So that's that's the idea behind Westin well, 

[00:27:55] Kamille: we'll take a look in just a second. I do want to say that that is really cool that [00:28:00] you had your first experience. You learned it over the years, became an expert yourself and started your own consultancy for Airtable and building Airtable like solutions.

[00:28:11] And now you're taking it a further step forward with helping you get those solutions even quicker by using a combination of tools, Airtable and AI, if I'm correct, right? 

[00:28:25] Mecca: Right. Yeah. So we're using ChatGPT on the backend. So I'm using the API. So it's really just those two. And honestly. The whole kind of proof of concept doesn't use more than maybe 20 lines of code between the whole thing.

[00:28:37] So it's very, it's very simple. Actually, it's just a lot of make connections and well, not even a lot of make connections. It's one make scenario that kind of handles the whole process. And that's kind of where it is today. Obviously, as you build it out, there'll be more features, but. Just trying to see what it can do and kind of experiment with some ideas and see, you know, where it goes from here.[00:29:00] 

[00:29:00] Well, 

[00:29:00] Kamille: I'm curious to see how there's only 20 lines of code. Let's take a look. Alright. 

[00:29:08] Dan: I had a question, maybe Mecca, before we jump into that. Tell us about your decision to, to leave the corporate world and start your own agency and why Airtable? 

[00:29:19] Mecca: Yeah, so I was, I was doing, you know, After the Disney project, I had a couple of other projects where I was kind of just bounced around different enterprises.

[00:29:28] I definitely learned a lot, but by my last project, I was actually working on the loan underwriting process for the PPP program during the pandemic. So I was working with a bank. I was talking to small business owners pretty much every single day, trying to help them get through the process of, you know, finding the right funding so they could continue their business operations through the crisis.

[00:29:50] And a lot of that was, you know, Direct customer support, which I really, I liked. I like talking to entrepreneurs and just understanding what their day to day [00:30:00] experiences was like, but I also liked the process of. Trying to streamline what we were doing as a program so that we could, you know, work faster, work more efficiently, work more accurately to deliver those those loans to the people we were serving.

[00:30:14] So working directly with those small business owners definitely just gave me that motivation to do it on my own because I felt like I could support them. With some of the solutions that I was learning how to build, you know, with Airtable and things like that to help them be more organized within their own businesses, work more efficiently, you know, streamline the processes.

[00:30:35] And, you know, just with the pandemic being where it was, it just felt like a great effort, a great time to just make a change. And so I decided to, you know, do what I felt like was my strongest skill at the point, which was You know, the consulting and also combining that with technology and starting off with, you know, maybe not the biggest companies yet, but I mean, at first, but, you know, trying to at least figure out how can I use Airtable to help, [00:31:00] you know, one person company, a five person company, a 10 so on and so forth and, and, and starting there.

[00:31:05] So that is, that is how I got into it. I really just made a decision one day to, to jump into it and ended up taking a leave of absence for a year and just working on the business. And after that year was up, I decided to just. Stick with it full time. So that's how I got to where I am today.

[00:31:26] Dan: Very cool. So people can find you at parkwestdigital. com. 

[00:31:31] Mecca: Yep. You can find me up there, or if you want to connect directly, LinkedIn's also a great place to, to get ahold of me. 

[00:31:40] Dan: All right. Very cool. Well, we're glad to have you on and excited to see, yeah, you kind of talked about Weston. Why don't you share your screen and give kind of a quick overview of what you got going on and pick out the details.

[00:31:56] There you go. 

[00:31:58] Mecca: All right. So [00:32:00] this database is more than just this kind of base building part of what we are presenting today, but for now, we'll, we'll just kind of show these two pages, which are the opportunities page and the basis page. So, you know, the opportunities is just any kind of deal that comes across our board that could potentially turn into a full time or full project.

[00:32:23] You know, we have all our different details about the project or about the opportunity. Which are kind of just not exactly relevant right now, but you know, the idea is, you know, take this, this kind of proof of concept tool and integrated into your sales process. So all the information is kind of just being tracked in one place.

[00:32:41] So we have a, we have our, our opportunities here. Each one is linked to a proof of concept that we already generated. So those proofs of concepts are in this basis view. And to start generating them, it's actually very simple. You only need really one thing, which [00:33:00] is what your requirements are. And so all of these examples here have their requirements.

[00:33:08] Actually let me show you the basis page, have their requirements written up as basically a, a, a, a mini RFP. This is kind of generated. This was generated by GPT. So it's it's probably not exactly what a client would give us a hundred percent, but it actually does give us a good enough. Starting point to start generating a base.

[00:33:29] So to generate a base, you know, obviously this one's already been generated, but to create one, it's very simple. We just click the create base button and give 

[00:33:39] Kamille: I think we're seeing a different screen than you're pointing to. We're seeing 

[00:33:44] Scott: opportunity. 

[00:33:46] Mecca: Okay. Can you still see me moving around now? Yes.

[00:33:52] I've got too many, too many windows open clearly. All right. So we have our opportunities. We have our basis. [00:34:00] To create a base for an opportunity, which is, you know, that proof of concept you can either open up any of these opportunities and click at a base here, or you can add them from the basis page.

[00:34:12] But for this example, I'll go ahead and add it from here. The idea is give your base a name. The example that we'll use for now will be we can use a project project management. RFP to, to kind of trigger this off. And so I will paste those requirements into here. And

[00:34:41] that's what it ends up looking like. 

[00:34:45] Dan: I think we're back to the other 

[00:34:46] Mecca: screen. Just going to close that whole window. We're 

[00:34:51] Dan: seeing that. There we go. Yeah, there we go. 

[00:34:55] Mecca: So you paste your requirements in. As you can see, it's, it gives you [00:35:00] the overview, gives you kind of the main functionality which is these main high level features.

[00:35:07] And they can give it a name. So we'll call this Airtable for project management, our marketing content management, this one is for, and as soon as you click create, it triggers the process for and make scenario to start building this, as you can see, the change that status I will, this takes actually a little bit of time.

[00:35:28] It ends up taking about a minute or so just because of the, the LLM processing, but when it's all said and done, what it ends up looking like. Is something like this. So I'll open this up and then I'll have to switch the screen just so you guys can follow along. So allow me to do that.

[00:35:54] So this is what it ended up creating for this particular example. It isn't a [00:36:00] perfect database by any means, but the idea is get it to the point where, you know, the consultant just has to kind of make tweets from here create the linking between the different tables. And, and kind of refine the fields and the table names to get it to a point where it's a decent proof of concept.

[00:36:18] So ends up building out the database structure based on the fields of the requirements that you're kind of pasted passing in, and then creates the tables, fields and everything else, field types as well, according to those initial requirements. So from there, you know, obviously, like I said, it's about iterating on this, building it out.

[00:36:41] And since this is kind of like the first version of how Westin works, I think there's a lot of improvement for not only like the structure of the database being better, but also, you know, doing things like pre filling your tables with, you know, sample data or you know, create giving you the ability [00:37:00] to, you know, not only just create a database from scratch, but maybe audit or provide recommendations on how to optimize a particular schema that you're passing for existing data.

[00:37:11] So, you know, For now, I think it's, it's still in its very basic stages, but I'm learning more and more about how the process of developing a table basis for clients is works and kind of like the inputs I can, you know, get at each stage. And so the idea is continue to develop it as I learn more. And, you know, that'll be the, I think the best way for it to be useful, not only to me, but to other people actually applied to real world Airtable consulting scenario.

[00:37:40] So. That is where it is at 

[00:37:43] Scott: today. Mecca, can you show us the make scenario behind the scenes, or do you not want to? 

[00:37:50] Mecca: I can show you. I don't have a problem showing you guys. On the make scenarios, it's not as, it's not that complicated. I would say the hardest part of [00:38:00] this was the prompting. Making sure that the prompt can give you the output you want.

[00:38:07] So let me put this to the side. Did 

[00:38:12] Scott: you ever run into that limit where... You couldn't set where chat GPT only lets you send X number of characters to it. 

[00:38:20] Mecca: Yeah. So the chat GPT module here before GPT for, I built this before GPT four came out. So I think we were using 3. 5 and it also before it had these 16, 000 care token limits.

[00:38:37] So I think it was like four, something like that. So. At the very beginning, I definitely ran into a lot of issues with that and I did some things like in my prompt, I would say, Hey, only make three tables, you know, for example, to kind of make sure it always have as minimal output as possible. But ever since they released the GPT 4 and all the different variations of 3.

[00:38:57] 5, I hadn't run into [00:39:00] that issue yet. Usually the tokens are around 3000 with inputs and outputs to get the base period for chat GPT. Nice, nice. So this is the scenario. It gets called using the make webhook uses chat GPT to take the prompt text which is passed in from the database so that we can choose different prompts to test with.

[00:39:31] We also have all the different information about the requirements that are coming in from the the database from WesternSO. All of that gets passed into ChadGBT. ChadGBT ends up outputting a JSON a JSON object with the fields for, and the tables for the Airtable API, which ends up getting called through this HTTP [00:40:00] module from here.

[00:40:03] You know, it actually creates the base to... Actually creates the base and returns the link or the ID for that base, which gets saved back in Airtable. Then from there, it's pretty much complete. So there's not too much to it in the back end. It's more so the prompt engineering that is probably the more difficult or time consuming part to create for this.

[00:40:32] Dan: That's awesome. So chat GPT is aware of the Airtable API meta, the meta API to generate the. 

[00:40:41] Mecca: So it, it, it is not, I wouldn't say it's necessarily ready. It's not, it's not necessarily aware of the exact specification of how it should be outputted it. If you just told it, Hey, generate output, that could be parsed as like JSO for an Airtable API for the Airtable [00:41:00] API, it would not give you the right output.

[00:41:03] You have to give it a lot of examples, or you have to give it perfect examples of how it should output. You also have to see how it fails on that output. And give it more instructions on how to handle certain situations. So it takes a lot of testing to figure out what those small nuances are, but once you kind of cover most of the edge cases it ends up, you know, it, it has ended up working pretty well.

[00:41:28] So having, I think once you get past that, once you get a good, good, a really good prompt that's, that's most of the functionality behind it. So that's 

[00:41:40] the 

[00:41:40] secret sauce there. Yeah. And I think that's really with a lot of these LLM applications is, can you figure out an algorithm and then turn the algorithm into a prompt that the model can process effectively and give you a good output?

[00:41:58] So, you know, all the [00:42:00] other stuff is just, and that's why I like using Airtable because you can build all the scaffolding and the data, the data structure, as well as the tools to interact with the data really quickly and then focus on refining the prompt, refining the. the algorithm without having to worry about coding and you know, all the small nuances that really just take too much time out of here.

[00:42:23] And you can just focus on like the main thing, keep the main thing, the main thing. 

[00:42:29] Dan: Nice. Very cool. Awesome. Mecca. Any other, any other highlights? What, what, what have you, what's your takeaway from this 

[00:42:39] Mecca: experience? My takeaway from this experience is that one AI is not. As out of the box, AI is good, but I think it's, it doesn't need, you don't need to use, you don't need to create crazy, robust AI [00:43:00] systems for them to be useful.

[00:43:01] If you can figure out how to apply it to a very specific use case, you know, in your business, then I think it can provide really great value. Something like ChadGBT being, you know, kind of like a, just a open canvas. is useful for some use cases, but it doesn't help you automate in that way, in a very streamlined way.

[00:43:21] So once you use an API and you can figure out your workflow and just inject a little bit of, you know, AI into it here and there, I think you can really change how you work. It's just, it's just a little bit of work to get there. But I'm just, I'm very optimistic about just the kind of tools that could be built with people that are, you know, being creative and Are you thinking about their prompts as almost like Code in and of itself functions for, you know, an application in and of itself that produces a particular output.

[00:43:55] So I just want more people continue to build things that are cool and interesting and [00:44:00] do new things. So yeah, if anybody is interested in these large language models and how to kind of like work with them, I'd love to see what people are working on and be able to help in some kind of way. So that's you definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn or on our website.

[00:44:19] Dan: Appreciate it, Mecca, 

[00:44:20] for showcasing that, and check out Mecca at his website, parkwestdigital. com. Alright, let's move on. Built on Air is a community of Airtable fans and users like yourself. Join us at builtonair.com/join. That will get you access into our free Slack community of thousands of Airtable users.

[00:44:43] Just like yourself. So check us out at Built on Air and 

[00:44:49] SEGMENT: AN APP A DAY -- 00:44:52 Alright, Scott's gonna showcase some Qualtrics. All right. How to use Airtable to [00:45:00] control your other systems. 

[00:45:02] Scott: Yes, yes. All right. Let me share my screen here.

[00:45:13] There we go. Okay. So one of, so this actually came out of a client request. There is an extension that you can add to Airtable. And it's called the chime extension. And basically what it does is whenever a record enters a view, you can have an Airtable make a chime alert. So, like, if an invoice gets paid, you can have, like, a little ding or something, so people know that there was a little alert sound made.

[00:45:46] But the problem with extensions in general is or, and in particular, this extension is, it will not run if the extension's side panel is closed. So the extensions. Thing always has to be open and extensions don't [00:46:00] run in interfaces. And so the question from my client was, how can I get a chime? How can I get a sound to happen on my Mac?

[00:46:11] Even if Airtable is closed, right? Cause we didn't even talk about that. If an invoice is paid when, even if you have the extensions panel open, it doesn't make a difference if your web browser. So I posted the question to the built on air community and Josh Sorenson, one of one of the members of the community gave me some incredible ideas.

[00:46:33] Which took me down the rabbit hole and now what I realize and what i'm going to present to you guys today Is that you can use Airtable to control almost anything on your mac And i'm assuming a pc I work on the mac So I don't actually know, you know what tools you would use on the pc to do this But not only can you control anything on your mac with Airtable But you can also Send [00:47:00] notifications to your devices as well The real notifications that you see every day on your phone on your iphone your ipad your android device and your desktop computer And you do need to use a couple extra tools and i'm going to show you right now two of those tools and how you can make this happen so basically if you are a longtime mac user you may know about the The incredible app that's called keyboard maestro.

[00:47:31] com. I think this has been out for 20 years now, maybe longer And this is possibly one of the most powerful tools that you could possibly get for your mac I'm assuming that there's something similar for this on pc So if you are a pc user don't rule out that you can't do this You might be able to do all the same stuff.

[00:47:51] And i'm i'm sure you probably can so what keyboard maestro does is it lets you set up macros? On your computer [00:48:00] that can control anything. And you typically trigger them through keyboard shortcuts. Like you'd hit a keyboard shortcut on your computer and it would launch a certain app, or it would paste some text in, or it would bring some windows to the front, or it would launch a bunch of apps and arrange them on your windows.

[00:48:17] You can control. Any aspect of your Mac with keyboard maestro, anything, including the volume controls, brightness controls putting your machine to sleep. You could do anything with keyboard maestro. And what I didn't realize, but what Josh pointed out to me is that they have a very cool feature.

[00:48:38] That's called remote triggers and what this enables you to do is it enables you to remotely Control your mac from anywhere else and they do it by By a simple webhook server. They've actually set up On their servers the keyboard maestro servers They've set up a webhook [00:49:00] server and all you have to do is send a simple you just set it up In keyboard maestro.

[00:49:06] You can set up as many remote triggers as you want and then you just send a very simple get request and And it looks something like this and you can set a send to get request You know in a variety of different ways you can do it with make. com You could do it with any api tool. You could do it with javascript But you can also just do a get request just by copying and pasting the value and putting it right into your web browser Right in your right in your url, you know location field.

[00:49:37] So i'm going to show you What the very first thing was that I did once I discovered this information And then I'm going to show you how much deeper you can go and how cool you can get with this. So, what I did was I decided to set up a make scenario for it. But again, you don't need to set up a make [00:50:00] scenario.

[00:50:00] I'm going to show you how you can do it just with the native Airtable automation as well. And, oh, you know what? I actually meant to delete this module. So, basically, What I've got here is I've got this webhook monitoring Square. So when a payment comes in from Square it will send a GET request to My copy of keyboard maestro.

[00:50:28] That's on my computer. Now what you can do is if you want like a whole bunch of people to get these alerts, what you do is when you configure this, you, it gives you a random code here and you could, you could overwrite this code with whatever you want. And what you could do is you can copy and paste this code to a whole bunch of different people's computers and then everybody will get the alert.

[00:50:49] So basically it's super, super simple. As soon as a payment comes in from square, it makes that sound. Did you guys hear that? Yeah. Nice. [00:51:00] And that's, I actually don't know why that triggered that right then. Maybe I don't know what happened, but I'm going to run this module. Right here and you'll hear it again.

[00:51:09] There we go So now you don't my client doesn't need to have that little chime extension running doesn't need to have even a web browser open But her mac will ka ching as soon as an invoice is paid. So then I started thinking. Oh my gosh Well, what else can we do now? The thing is keyboard maestro can also Pop up little notifications on your computer as well.

[00:51:36] But what's very cool is turns out there's an app called pushover and pushover is the exact same sort of thing that, that, that I just showed you with keyboard maestro, it's essentially set up. Their own web hook server, and you can make API calls to it. Very, very simple API calls that they outline on their website here.[00:52:00] 

[00:52:00] Now, by the way, these use post as opposed to get, so you can't just copy and paste these into your web browser. So you actually would need to use something like Java scripting or make or something to actually send to this. And the cool thing about pushover is that it actually gives you a native alert.

[00:52:19] On your Mac, iPhone, Android, whatever. And I'll show you how that works as well. So basically I'm going to come in our automations here. Oh, and by the way, this is an example of how I'm just going to go back one second. I can trigger keyboard. My, so I don't have to go through make, let's say something happens in my Airtable base here.

[00:52:41] And I want it to trigger that that caching noise. Here it is. I actually don't even need all these lines of code. I just really need this one right here. And it will automatically, I'm going to test this.

[00:52:55] It'll send, there you go. There's the ka ching. So you don't even need to use external [00:53:00] tools to get any of your keyboard maestro things to function. And once again, I only did a ka ching sound in keyboard maestro, but you can do anything. You could have it search through your address book on your computer and type an email for you or whatever.

[00:53:17] It's completely controlling your Mac. Okay. So now we're going to go back to the second thing, which was pushover. And I'm going to show you how I set that up in Airtable. What I've got here is I'm going to turn this on here. And what I've got here is that when. An order. I just have this fake order database here.

[00:53:37] So I've got a couple of orders here and let's pretend this order is not paid yet. So when an order is marked as paid, then it's going to trigger a webhook that I've got set up in make. So now I'm gonna go out of this and I'm gonna go into my other demo here. My other scenario. I'll turn this one off.

[00:53:57] I'll turn this one on [00:54:00] and now what this is doing is this is very simply waiting to receive the webhook notification from Airtable. You know, the request being sent to this webhook. I mean, it's going to get it's going to get that record from Airtable and then it's going to do the post request. To pushover.

[00:54:20] So these are the values that pushover has given me. And I've typed in a little custom information here and let's take a look at what this looks like. So, oops. All right. Sorry. My controls for the. Podcast we're in the way. Okay. So now we're going to go back here And I am going to come back out to my Airtable here and i'm going to say that this order was paid and so The Airtable automation has probably kicked in And then I got a ka ching noise[00:55:00] 

[00:55:01] Kamille: Is it hooked to the right keyboard maestro? 

[00:55:05] Scott: Yeah, you know, I actually don't know why I got the key. Oh, you know what? These are both turned on. This one sent it to keyboard maestro. This one actually turned, sent it to pushover. Pushover actually alerted me on my phone. I think it's because I have do not disturb on, on my Mac.

[00:55:19] Can you guys see this on my phone? 

[00:55:21] Kamille: We can see that. Yeah. 

[00:55:23] Scott: And so it's actually sent me notification on my phone. Let me see. Oh, here it is. It actually was hidden because I have do not disturb turned on. So let me turn off, do not disturb. And now let's try it again. You could see it live because it's more fun to actually see it live than for me to show you after.

[00:55:41] So I'm going to clear that out and I'm going to click paid. And first we're going to get the Ka ching sound because this one's triggering and then send notification to pushover. Oh, it just came into my phone again. Oh, it's still hiding it. I don't know why it's still hiding it. Well, that's 

[00:55:58] a Mac thing, not a process [00:56:00] thing.

[00:56:00] Say that again. I'm sorry. That's a Mac thing. Not your. 

[00:56:03] Yeah, it's, I thought I cleared this for pushover. Notification. I already turned off. Do not disturb. 

[00:56:10] It's 

[00:56:11] Kamille: fine. Let's look at the notification. 

[00:56:13] Scott: Yeah, let's look at it. It basically says Dan Feller's has paid order number four in the amount of 420. So there it is.

[00:56:22] Dan Feller's has paid order number four in the amount of 420. And. Yeah, it's as simple as that. And you could set all sorts of cool things with their API. You could set a custom sound and all sorts of cool things. They listed here. You could even send attachments with it. Very, very cool. Very easy to set up.

[00:56:43] And so then I was thinking, well, how can you even take this to the next level? Right. There is a service called ring central where people can get, you know, incoming phone calls. It's like a voice over IP service. You know, they give you phone numbers. It's like Google voice. And I was thinking, wouldn't it [00:57:00] be cool if I actually was inspired by this, by a post on the Airtable community forum.

[00:57:05] And I was thinking, wouldn't it be cool if. You get an incoming call through your voice over IP service and Airtable automatically takes you to the record of the person who is calling, even if you don't have Airtable running at all. So what I've done is I've set up in my system here. I've got some customers here and I've got their phone numbers in a hidden field.

[00:57:29] So I'm respecting everybody's privacy with their phone numbers. And I've got their photos here as well. And Dan, do you have the phone number I gave you earlier before the show? Okay, great. So what I'd like you to do is make an incoming call to that phone number. And what I'm going to do on my computer is I'm just going to hide everything.

[00:57:45] So I, I don't even have, you know, Airtable up at all. I don't have my web browser up. Nothing's going at all. And then, Dan, you tell me when you're calling that that phone number. 

[00:57:57] Dan: Yeah, it's calling. [00:58:00] Yeah, it's ringing. Right, it is ringing now. 

[00:58:03] Scott: So, I'm just working on my Mac and I'm doing whatever.

[00:58:11] And then... Hopefully. Yeah, hopefully. Let's see. And do I have it turned on? Let me

[00:58:24] see. Cool. An automated voice messaging system is not available. 

[00:58:29] Dan: I went to voicemail. At the tone, please record your message. Did I 1 for more. 

[00:58:35] Scott: I don't think that... I don't think so. Let me try it. I'm gonna call from my phone. Let me see here. 

[00:58:41] Kamille: And do you have to accept the call or no? It's just when you 

[00:58:44] are called.

[00:58:46] Scott: Well, you can actually set it. So I set a filter here in make to set it when it's set to just ringing. But you can actually said the call was accepted. The call went to voicemail. The call, you know, you could basically set it to whatever you want. Yep. Let [00:59:00] me try it here and see.

[00:59:06] Oh, see, we got a different. Yeah. 

[00:59:10] Dan: Okay. I double checked the number you gave me. I don't know if that's a nine. 

[00:59:14] Scott: Oh, this is a fake number. I got from there. Is it 9 0 2 2 1? 

[00:59:19] Dan: Yeah. That's what I called. 

[00:59:20] Scott: a minute. You got a different, you actually got a different response when you called. 

[00:59:24] Kamille: Are you sure it's not 8 6 7 5 3 0 9?

[00:59:29] Scott: You know, it is possible. I am on the free trial. So maybe they're only accepting calls from my phone number at the moment. That could be the thing. Cause I just actually signed up for this for this demo. So maybe it's only accepting calls from me, but basically you can see what happened there. I'm glad I had that set up for my number as well.

[00:59:46] But so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to call the number. And watch my computer screen here. You know, I'm all of a sudden it automatically launched my web browser, took me into my Airtable base in a new tab and [01:00:00] brought up the record of the person who's calling me. Oh, Dan, did you call the exact same number?

[01:00:09] Dan: Yeah, 

[01:00:10] Scott: that's so funny. I don't know why it didn't work before But the idea is very very easy to set up with make that I did with keyboard maestro So I know we were talking about pushover right before I mentioned this that I did with keyboard maestro So basically when the call comes in i'm filtering only certain types of calls and then i'm searching For that particular phone number in Airtable, and then if it finds that person in Airtable, it's going to make a request to keyboard maestro.

[01:00:39] It's going to pass on the this is the get request. It's going to tack on the ID. And basically in Keyboard Maestro, I then parse that idea out here. And all it does is it activates Google Chrome, it opens up a new Google Chrome tab, and then here's the URL it goes to. And then at the very end [01:01:00] here, this is what's called the trigger value.

[01:01:03] So that's the variable. It puts it into that URL and that's how it brings that up. So this is just the tip of the iceberg. Like, but this really, I feel like, breaks through to like new boundaries. New, it breaks, it breaks through barriers because you can use so many things. And I especially love the pushover because you can send notifications to all your devices and they pop up just like normal auto, you know notifications do they put, they, they come up right on your lock screen and everything.

[01:01:34] So I think that a combination of keyboard maestro. And pushover and make an air cable Can get can enable you to do anything anything? Yeah, the whole world it opens up. So i'm super excited about all of that 

[01:01:53] Dan: That's awesome. Yeah, you could do so many things. You could, you just implemented like a call center system, [01:02:00] 

[01:02:00] Scott: like a real call center system where you don't have to keep Airtable up and running at all times, right?

[01:02:06] And keep checking that screen to see what's happening. 

[01:02:09] Yeah, 

[01:02:10] Dan: that's really cool. Yeah, there's some fun tricks that you could do in there. 

[01:02:14] Yeah, very fun tricks. So, explore those apps 

[01:02:18] Scott: and see all the cool things you can do. 

[01:02:22] Mecca: Are both of those free? Do both of those have free plans or do you have to pay for those?

[01:02:27] Scott: They start off with free plans, but I think after 30 days, both of them you have to pay for. Oh, with, oh, sorry, Keyboard Maestro. Okay, that's not bad. You know what the thing is, I think that pushover is like one fee only, one flat fee, and it's very low, and then you never have to pay again, I believe, and then Keyboard Maestro, you only have to pay when they come up with like major upgrades, so they each, it's not a monthly fee, it's just one flat fee for those apps.

[01:02:56] Mecca: That's really cool. It's like turning your, your MacBook into an [01:03:00] IOT device, you know, probably could do a lot more than just that. 

[01:03:02] Scott: Exactly. It's so funny. You said that because when I discovered this NECA, I was actually thinking, Oh my God, my refrigerator is wifi enabled. Can I control my refrigerator and my washing machine from Airtable?

[01:03:15] I mean, and I'm sure we can. 

[01:03:17] Mecca: Yeah, yeah. It's true with HomeKit or something like that. 

[01:03:20] Scott: Yeah. Your Mac and your devices become these. Yeah. Your Mac becomes an IOT device. Very 

[01:03:28] Mecca: cool. 

[01:03:30] Dan: Awesome. Thank you, Scott and Mecca and Kamille. Thank you for coming on this week and we will see everybody next week on episode six.

[01:03:39] Have a good week. 

[01:03:40] Mecca: All right. Thanks everybody. Bye bye you guys.

[01:03:57] Outro: Thank you for joining today's episode. We hope you enjoyed it. [01:04:00] Be sure to check out our sponsor On2Air backups, automated backups for Airtable. We'll see you next time on the built on air podcast.