Create a shortcut for a recurring Zoom Meeting on Mac: a tutorial
Spending lots of time everyday searching for that Zoom's invite link to a daily meeting you need to attend? Don't worry, you could create a simple icon shortcut to start that meeting. This article will guide you on how I devise a practical solution and explain to you step-by-step how to do the same.
Remote working and education is here to stay and lots of us have recurring meetings to attend. Usually, if you — or your company or school — are doing things right, you got a fixed invite link to access this meeting, and it will be protected by a password — usually incorporated on the URL. The problem is that you always had to access this meeting from the same link, or else you will have to type a lengthy cryptic password.
I'm a college professor, and to our daily meeting with students I found myself always spending time searching for the same invite links on bookmarks, e-mails or on our Discord server, and found that many students and friends are having the same struggle on their day-to-day online lives.
The Solution
To save myself from stress and spare me to be late on one more meeting, I created a simple elegant solution for Mac: devise a shortcut, in the shape of a miniapp with the Automator. I will teach you how to do the same for your recurring Zoom meetings.
Goals
First things first, we got to understand what we gonna do. We want to create an app that, on opening, will start our chosen meeting within the Zoom app. I tested and it works for what Zoom calls a personal link — that fixed personal URL that someone with a premium Zoom account could configure. It will work for any fixed meeting URL with a fixed password.
So, to make it happens:
- Zoom Universal Link
First, we will understand and configure the URL we need to start/attend a meeting. - Automator
Second, we will learn how to make magic within Automator to generate our shortcut app. - Configure the app icon
Then, we will change Automator's generated miniapp icon to something more becoming of our amazing Zoom shortcut.
1. Zoom Universal Link
We'll start by understanding how we open the Zoom app with a link.
It's not common knowledge that we got two types of links: the default https:// ones, that open a webpage, and the custom [app]:// ones, which could be identified on macOS and iOS to open and send messages direct into applications. This second type are called Universal Links.
When we enter the Zoom through the invite link, usually we got directed to the default browser and a webpage opens asking us to click a blue button to, only then, be redirected to the Zoom app. This custom link in the format [app]:// is how the webpage can open and redirect us to the Zoom app. We need to got your hands on some version of this universal link too.
Our Zoom Universal Link has the following format:
zoommtg://zoom.us/join?confno=[meeting_id]&pwd=[password]
You guessed right. Change [meeting_id] for the meeting id. And change [password] for the … meeting password. Basically the same parameters on the original invite link.
This link already was an improvement from the original invite link. Double click on it or paste it on on the browser's address bar and your Zoom app will open on the chosen meeting.
2. Automator
Now that we already have the perfect link, we need to create our Automator app. Automator is a not-so-well-known application that helps you automate workflows and create mini-apps to execute these workflows automatically on Mac. You could do a lot of stuff with Automator, like execute scripts, organize files, send e-mails.
We will develop a really small pipeline, just to open a Webpage. Since we have a Universal Link, we know this task will make the Mac open the Zoom app, not our browser!
To start, open Automator. You could use the ⌘+␣ (cmd + space bar) shortcut to open Spotlight and then search for "Automator".
When opening Automator app, you'll see a pop up asking you to choose a type for your document. Choose Application.
Then, you need to add two action components.
The first one is Get Specified URLs. Search for it on the search bar at the upper left corner. Double-click on it. It should be added to your workflow at the right, as a panel.
Lets configure this action. Add the Zoom link we configured earlier. Then, click on the button options in the Get Specified URLs panel. Mark the option "Ignore this action's input." This way, our shortcut will not keep asking you to select a URL from the list, and we'll only need to inform the link once, on this setup.
Now we will need to add our second action named Display Webpages. Search for it and double-click on it, as we did with the first action. There is no need for further configuring it.
We are done! Go to File > Save… to save it. Name it as you want: it will be your shortcut. Remember to keep the file format as "Application".
After saving it, you could close the Automator app. We are almost done! Let’s see what we got:
This is the mini-app just saved. It is ready to be used to open your meetings. If you want, you can stop following this tutorial right now. But we're not happy yet with the default icon Automator gave us, right? We can do better than this.
3. Configure the app icon
To change the app icon we got two main quick possibilities.
Copy and paste between apps
If you just want the same icon from another app, copy and paste it between "Get Info…" popups for this and the other app. To do that, just select the icon image on the upper left corner of the first app's "Get Info…" popup, press ⌘+C, then select the icon you want to replace on the second app, and press ⌘+V. It should work as the following gif.
Icon from a custom image
Now, suppose you want a custom icon, not the same one from another app. It's easy, but a little tricky — it was hard to find the right way to do this on internet. Don't worry, we got you covered!
If you try to copy any image file and paste it as we just did between icons, you will notice the target icon will become fully transparent — the image file will not be compatible with the desired icon format.
To do that the right way, open "Preview" for any arbitrary image, click on it, press ⌘+A to select the content of the image, press ⌘+C to copy it, then you just paste it (⌘+V) on our shortcut's "Get Info…", as we explained just now. It should work and you'll have your image of choice as the new icon of your shortcut.
On this example, we created some colorful variations of the Zoom icon for our shortcut, to visually distinguish it from the original and the app.
All set!
Now that we finished it, you can enter on your recurring meeting with ease. Just double tap your shortcut and Zoom will open with the meeting you set earlier on Automator.
If you want to, you could move this app to your Applications folder, and add it as a shortcut on your dock. This is the way I personally prefer.
Cool right? 😎
