ThoughtAsylum

I was recently having a discussion on Twitter about how to get into creating workflows for the amazing iOS app known simply as Workflow. It allows you to use Automator style actions to put together simple yet sophisticated sequences of actions to carry out an operation such as manipulating a photograph or sending a message out on social media channels. Unfortunately the problem currently is that the available resources can be difficult to find.

Today I was using one of my TextExpander snippets that utilises form fields to add some content to this site. I’m one of those people who still typically works in HTML when working with a content management system (sometimes it is the only way to get things how I want them) and when I was adding HTML content into one of the form fields I noticed that the double quotes for the attributes were being automatically being turned into smart quotes rather than staying as the nice simple dumb quotes I needed. It wasn’t something I’d noticed before and it was incredibly frustrating to correct after using the form field each time. After a bit of digging around in TextExpander preferences, etc. I finally found the rather simple solution.

A while back I refreshed and expanded upon my TextExpander snippet groups and promised to start covering some of the inner workings of what the snippets actually do. Today I found a bit of time to make a start on that and I’m beginning with some of the snippets related to underlining.

In my work I regularly work with software that (unfortunately) has a dependence on Adobe Flash Player. There can be compatibility issues with particular version combinations and so occasionally I find myself needing to verify Flash player versions. Normally I’m able to do this by visiting any of a variety of web sites that can query the version number of Flash player. However I recently found myself in a position where I was remotely accessing a client machine, but it had no Internet provision meaning I couldn’t query it from any of the usual sites I use. Instead I employed a simple trick to work out the Flash player version.

Whilst I have knowledge of coding languages is reasonably broad my knowledge of spoken and written languages is rather limited. English is pretty much my only language though I can probably get away for asking directions or buy a coffee in a handful of others. It therefore isn’t really a surprise that from time to time I come across information that’s in a language I don’t understand well enough to translate it myself. When I’m at a laptop or desktop computer with an Internet connection I use an online translations service like Google Translate. Sometimes however I’m on an iOS device and whilst I can use such services I decided to put together a little Workflow app workflow to try and speed up the process.

Happy new year everyone. We’ve passed another year’s end so once again it’s time to take a look back at what’s been most popular on thoughtasylum.com in the past twelve months and what’s I’ve been up to.

On 12 January 2016 Microsoft officially ended support for all remaining versions of its Internet Explorer browser prior to Internet Explorer 11. As a result Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or technical support for versions prior to Internet Explorer 11. This can potentially leave users vulnerable to yet to be discovered security vulnerabilities and as history bears out this is a very real risk.

As regular readers of this site may know I’m a big fan of the Workflow application on iOS. It’s an application that allows you to build up sequences of actions to carry out some sort of automation. I use it for many little helpful things on the go and one of those is combining together images into a single collage image which is what I’m sharing today.

Club MacStories is a membership value add option provided by the rather popular MacStories.net web site. I’m a Club MacStories member and as such receive the weekly newsletter which contains lots of additional Apple related material and articles. In last week’s newsletter (issue 24) one of the user questions was around automatically attaching and detaching DMGs and whilst a partial solution was provided, the response also invited readers to round it out to complete the last part. I figured I’d give it a go and share what I came up with.

Keyboard Maestro is one of my favourite Mac utilities. It’s like having a Swiss Army knife that includes not only a simple blade but also a scalpel, chainsaw, electron microscope and a suit of armour. If I can’t easily do something in another utility chances are there’s a way to use Keyboard Maestro to get the job done.

Any Mac user interested in things such as automation and productivity will no doubt have come across TextExpander, Smile Software’s utility that allows you to instantly replace a string of text with a different string of text. This can be used to auto correct typographic errors, insert boiler plate chunks of text or even trigger scripts or fill-in forms that can return more dynamic sets of text. Like so many others who start using it I now find it indispensable.

In my last post I described a method for tagging temporary TextExpander snippets with a date stamp and using some scripting to automatically remove expired snippets. In that post I mentioned that I use Keyboard Maestro to schedule the expired snippets clean-up script and that I also used it to help me in setting up those temporary snippets. In this post I’m going to provide some details on exactly how I’m using Keyboard Maestro to help with this.

I haven’t posted about Workflow for a little while, but it remains one of my favourite applications on iOS and I’m still actively creating and revising workflows. In fact I’m currently clocking in at 176 workflows on my devices. Today I thought I’d clear up the dry spell on Workflow related posts and put something together around one of my text manipulation workflows. This particular one manipulates the character case of text on the device clipboard.

I was reading through issue 33 of the MacStories newsletter (to which I’m a paid subscriber) and I spotted an interesting request from one of the readers to do with efficiently creating presentations to have multiple outputs for a small variety of uses. The reader was hoping to find a way to maintain multiple versions automatically when updating source material. The MacStories team called out to other readers for suggestions on addressing this. In this post I’m going to outline my approach to the issue.

The majority of configuration in Visualization Solutions by Nakisa (VSN) applications is achieved via the changing of settings in the AdminConsole, Nakisa’s standard administration interface. For a typical configuration this is all that you would require. Unfortunately all too often, typical is not what a client wants and so we have to look beyond the current capabilities of AdminConsole. There are other occasions too where perhaps it is a laborious or inefficient task to do a particular piece of configuration in AdminConsole compared to another method. In those situations I turn to configuring the underlying configuration files directly.

I love finding little shortcuts to help me get things done. Sometimes it’s through automation of processes I do occasionally and sometimes its through speeding up something smaller that I need to do frequently. In this post I want to share something that definitely falls into the latter category. Duplicating files in Windows Explorer.

Like many who blog I keep a list of topic ideas which I plan to blog about at some point. When I get some time to write I pick a topic that I like the look of and get some words thrashed out. I was surprised when I saw something in last week’s MacStories members’ newsletter that directly related to something rather niche I had on my list. As I expect you’ve already guessed, this post is about that particular topic. It’s about getting text to and from the iOS app Drafts from Dropbox.

I spend quite a bit of time experimenting with the Workflow App by the folks over at DeskConnect. It’s an iOS application that brings Mac automator-style automation into the palm of your hand. As a result of my experimentations I’ve built up quite a library of workflows and whilst I wait for some sort of structure for the workflows I’ve come up with a few little tricks, notations and workflows to help me keep things organised. I’m going to share one of those with you today.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post I have quite a few Workflow app workflows on my iOS devices. Like many other long time Workflow users I’m looking forward to having a better way to keep track of and structure my collection of Workflows. However unlike everyone else I don’t want folders…

A month or two ago I had a bit of a problem with Windows Explorer and Google Drive that was rather painful. I lost a day of work to putting right an issue that simply shouldn’t have occurred and to be honest I’m quite glad it happened to me and not one of my colleagues as I imagine that for many of them things would have ended a lot worse. It was at this point that I began looking at alternatives to Windows Explorer.

As part of my day job I work with lots of files and one of the common activities I need to carry out is to compare the contents of those files to find omissions and inconsistencies. Fortunately most of the files I need to compare are pure text based files (e.g. XML, XSL, LOG, TXT, INI) and there are plenty of tools available to help work with those files. To work with files in general on Windows I make use of the XYplorer file manager and fortunately for me it is pretty easy to integrate my comparison tool of choice into it.

Another year ends and so it’s time to take my regular look back at what’s been particularly popular on thoughtasylum.com over this period and to also reflect on what I’ve been doing.

Working with data and configuration files is a part of my day job and this presents me with many opportunities to automate the things I need to do with them. Recently I had a need to check a large set of XML files to make sure there were no obvious errors in them and the approach I settled on was to integrate a command line tool into XYplorer - my Windows file manager of choice.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time helping out others on Twitter with their use of the Workflow app on iOS. In doing this I’ve fairly frequently come across people who are having notable issues that come down to it being a bug in the application. I’m often surprised that people seem to think that the best place to report a bug is via Twitter with a few vague sentences of description. To that end I figured I’d put together a quick overview of how I think I’d want the issues reported if I were one of the Workflow developers; which just to be clear, I’m not.

Around a year ago Smile released their new version of TextExpander. This new version created quite a bit of ‘heated debate’ in the Mac community and whilst many eschewed the update I chose not to. I’m glad I did and I thought others might find it interesting to get some idea of why that’s the case.

In my work I often find myself building spreadsheets to carry out calculations, manage sophisticated processes and capture information. These spreadsheets can often extend to covering many worksheets and as a result it can be awkwardly slow to navigate to particular worksheets just by paging back and forth with the navigation buttons. In this post I’m going to illustrate a couple of useful techniques to help you navigate around.

Every quarter SAP releases a set of updates for its SuccessFactors suite of products. With each release my colleagues and I examine the updates and analyse what is important and the impact it has for SuccessFactors customers. Be it change, enhancement or deprecation we’re on it. For the Q2 2017 release I picked up the analysis for the SuccessFactors service desk solution - Employee Central Service Centre

In my work, I write a lot of documents. A surprising amount in fact, probably equalled only by the number of spreadsheets. The majority of these (Microsoft Word) documents are produced for clients and I like to ensure as, best I can, that they are not only accurate but well presented. However, in order to simplify document production I make judicious use of templating and Word’s fields functionality. I use not only standard fields but also custom ones as well to update content in multiple places simultaneously on refresh.

The cloud-based cross-platform release of TextExpander has been around for over a year having launched in early April 2016. Whilst there has undoubtedly been a lot of progress on the apps (the Windows version in particular) the promise of the cloud platform I still don’t think has been realised and there’s still a lot of scope for improvement. In this post, I’m offering up a handful of ideas of where I’d like to see an improvement or offering from TextExpander. Most of these have already been shared with TextExpander, but the more consumer interest in a feature the more likely they’ll be to implement it and the sooner they’ll consider doing so.