I made Quartz, a desktop automation app for Windows and Linux. It’s pretty similar to the Shortcuts app on MacOS. Quartz allows you to create shortcuts, which are lists of actions, that run things on your computer, whether that is read a file, send a web request, or something else. These shortcuts can be activated manually or using triggers (e.g. at a certain time). The main reason I created this, and the most important QoL improvement is that with Quartz, you can easily create and manage small scripts that do stuff on your computer, like watch a file or directory and running subsequent actions. The most challenging part was adapting/scrapping features for Linux, since a user’s environment can be very different from another user’s environment, so I had to choose some important features and scrap the unrealistic ones. For example, I really wanted to add an emulate mouse/keyboard button action, but it simply wasn’t feasible, since the app would have to require root privileges on both platforms, which was something I was trying to avoid. I am proud of how the project turned out, but especially the user interface, since it took a while to design and actually build the interface, and I think it turned out well, with a bit room for improvement. Some UI changes will come in future updates.
To test the project, you first need to make sure that you are on either Windows or a systemd-based Linux distribution. Then you can simply just follow the instructions on the README. The app uses a Python FastAPI daemon with a Flutter UI. To save memory, the UI is a completely seperate process than the daemon, so it’s OK to close the app window/kill the UI process without affecting the backend.
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