ThoughtAsylum

A few days ago over on the Automators podcast forum I answered a query about making use of the iOS app Launch Center Pro, which had recently been updated. The post was fairly extensive and received a lot of positive feedback. I therefore decided to paraphrase it here on my own web site as a reference for those who follow my writing. The posting came about in response to queries from a couple of users about use cases and a general utilisation of the app and so, in response, I decided to share some details about what it does for me. It focuses on the fact that Launch Center Pro offers me some specific features that I find useful, but for some of these features there are certainly alternative approaches. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as different approaches suit different workflows and different mind sets. Based on that I set out the following assertion for everything that follows. Launch Center Pro isn’t necessarily an app for everyone, but it can be an app for anyone, from novice through to advanced iOS user.

Did you know there’s a way to speed up Shortcuts shortcuts on iOS? It’s really simple and can make a huge impact. Particularly on more complex shortcuts.

The latest iteration of the iOS app Launch Center Pro comes with an option to use a Shortcuts shortcut to add launchers for shortcuts to Launch Center Pro. It allows you to grab a shortcut from Shortcuts, and to set the launcher icon and the launch URL in Launch Center Pro. Very meta, and very cool. However, I have a lot of shortcuts. I’m often at the four figure mark, and it just doesn’t give me the ease of set-up I need, and also I often like to run my shortcuts via a shortcut launcher to speed things up. To that end, I took it upon myself to produce an enhanced version of the original shortcut.

Last year I posted a small piece on text editing to the Automators forum. It was inspired by another post on the Drafts forum and focused on coming up with a way to edit text making more use of the screen estate than the paltry offering of the standard text options in Shortcuts. The premise was simply to enable a larger text editing area via Scriptable.

Early last month, a student teacher was posting on the Automators forum about using Drafts to make dealing with templates such as lesson plans easier. Through a bit of discussion in the thread, it came about that the student teacher really just was looking for a way to get simple text entry into a format compatible with the template - i.e. printable vs. editable. With this amendment I was able to put together an example based on the template they provided that would transform text in a draft via a Drafts action and Shortcuts into a nicely formatted PDF document. In this post I’m going to review the solution and approach as to how I did that.

Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) is the integrated HR ticketing solution for SuccessFactors. Based on several components, the solution leverages functionality from Employee Central (EC), SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer (C4C), SAP Cloud Platform (SCP) and other optional components. In reviewing this Q1 2019 release, I’m going to look specifically at the SCP and C4C updates that impact the use and implementation/maintenance of ECSC.

We’re now well into the second quarter of 2019, and that means that it’s almost time for the Q2 release of SAP SuccessFactors to be released to customers. The questions are, what’s in this latest release and what do customers need to know? That’s exactly the overarching question my colleagues and I at Zalaris tackle with our quarterly reviews. We compile the information SAP release, check the preview systems and then draw upon our own analytical skills and implementation & support experience to filter the wealth of information down to the key elements, presenting them in a format we hope is friendly and consumable by all.

I was working on a slide deck for work recently where I wanted to transition from one slide to another after a specified period of time. I was using PowerPoint and figured this would be no problem at all. I’d used this approach many times previously, but on this occasion it simply wouldn’t advance. The reason I eventually discovered was down to some on-slide animation.

In my day job I work with a lot of raw data, and I make judicious use of Microsoft Excel to help me in the builds and transforms I need to accomplish. As many people are no doubt aware, Excel can be quite useful with the use of tab separated text as it treats each tab as a way to separate data out into cells and each new line as a new row in a spreadsheet. At least that’s what I thought. Recently however, I fell foul of finding tab separated data on my Windows clipboard not pasting into Excel in this way. But I did track down why this occurred.

The quarter sees a wide range of updates across Cloud for Customer, Ask HR, and SuccessFactors Mobile, that will affect customers utilising Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC). It’s time for some significant changes to take place, so let’s dive in.

It’s already drawing to a close on the first quarter of the year and spring is upon us in the UK. That can only mean that the Q1 release of SuccessFactors is in preview environments and ready for imminent release. The question then is what does this mean for organisations who are using SuccessFactors? That’s what my colleagues and I strive to understand and share in our quarterly review of the SuccessFactors release. We sift through the information and draw upon our own experiences to pick out the key information and distil it down into a format that can be understood by everyone. Hopefully the insights we’ve provided over the last three and a half years help both clients and partners get more value from the releases and we’re always keen to hear feedback where about how the articles help people understand and get more from their investment.

If you are a Drafts user, you may be familiar with the concept of workspaces, but there’s also a (related) folder concept too that’s been around since much earlier versions of Drafts. In this post I’m going to explain a little about these folders and what they actually contain in regards to your Drafts.

I recently got a new Mac laptop, my previous one being the best part of a decade old, and I found myself copying new (non-app store) applications from the Downloads folder to the Applications folder far more often than I was comfortable with. To that end I decided to automate the process.

Shortcuts is a versatile automation tool on iOS, but it does have limitations. Many of these stem from it not being a true scripting/programming language, but rather a visual automation tool. When compared to alternatives like Pythonista or Scriptable, the app comes up a little short on things you might like to do with it sometimes that would be easier in other programming languages? But what if I told you that Shortcuts can actually tap into some of that coding power through a technique for evaluating JavaScript? Interested? Well let me explain.

SuccessFactors mobile holds a special place in our quarterly reviews as unlike other areas; it isn’t exactly matched to the quarterly release cycle. Instead, the iOS and Android mobile apps are released on a monthly cycle, and so we have a look back at recent updates and forward to pending and upcoming ones. This quarter though we have a mixture as some of the features are ones that happen behind the scenes and will be accessible to apps as soon as the core functionality is updated in the quarterly release. But before we begin looking at new and updated features, we need to look at some platform-related changes that SAP is introducing.

Once again, we’re experiencing a very quiet quarter for SuccessFactors Learning, with the administrator user interface refresh being such a large piece of redevelopment work and consuming the development team’s time. Learning is set to receive some updates via the mobile app and through some updates to system integrations. But what SAP did choose to do this quarter, was to share some details as to what is coming up for Learning. How People Analytics is going to impact Learning, a peek at the administrator user interface redevelopment and a ‘heads-up’ on some changes due next year where affected customers will need to act.

After a packed second-quarter release of features and improvements for Employee Central Service Centre, quarter three eases off a little and to my mind focuses on maturing some of the existing aspects of the solution. Nevertheless, the updates this month are important and will almost certainly have significant impact. For example, I can see many of the user interface enhancements making a real difference to the efficiency of agents – freeing up more of their time to deal with requests versus spending it on data maintenance and system navigation. Likewise, administrators will find useful options introduced that could open up some new opportunities.

The weekend prior to 9 September 2019. Updates are currently available in customer test systems, but what are those updates? With each release, SuccessFactors release a flood of information in the form of webinars and documents that most customers simply don’t have time to process. This makes it difficult at best for customers to get the best value from the solutions and partners to keep on top of all of the key aspects. To that end, every quarter for the past four years, my colleagues and I have been analysing and summarising the changes, and drawing upon our SuccessFactors consulting experience to provide additional insight into the impact, uses and benefits these changes can have for an organisation who have implemented, or are currently implementing, SuccessFactors modules.

Recently there was a query on the Automators podcast forum, where someone wanted to know how to retrieve a mobile phone number from a contact using Shortcuts. This isn’t something that Shortcuts supports “out-of-the-box”, but it is something that Shortcuts can do with a bit of cajoling. In this post I’ll explain some of the details about one way of doing it.

The i*OS Shortcuts application has a surprising amount of numerical functions tucked away within its calculation actions. These include not only statistical functions, but also some arithmetic functions familiar to many programmers. One of these is the modulus function. Many of you may have used this in your mathematical studies at school. It is frequently used as the basis for time calculations on 12 and 24 hour clocks. But there’s more than one way to apply a modulus.

If you have visited thoughtasylum.com much in the past, you may have noticed a change recently. The site has been rebuilt. It isn’t just a makeover, it’s actually a rebuild from the ground-up. In this post I’m going to give a little bit of background to the what, why and how.

In the final release of 2019, SAP are bringing quite a few useful updates to their SuccessFactors HR helpdesk solution. These range from speed and efficiency improvements through to significant enhancements of existing functionality. It’s a release that introduces something for every Employee Central Service Centre user, be they a service agent, a service manager, or an employee. As usual I’ll split things up into updates around the service agent facing part of the solution (Cloud for Customer, C4C), and the employee facing part of the solution (Ask HR).

The Workflow app was an amazing gateway app for automation on iOS when it first appeared, and I’ve been using it since its very first release. It built on x-callback URLs and revolutionised the way people can interact with their hand-held Apple devices. After it’s acquisition by Apple, the app evolved into Shortcuts, and in 2019 underwent major developments with the introduction of third party donations through actions and advanced intents as well as automation and parameters. Now that the ThoughtAsylum web site update is in place, I’ve turned what attention I can spare to some additional projects; one of which is a new and ongoing collection of shortcuts.

Last year, Keyboard Maestro 9 was released, and with it, official support for a piece of hardware called a Stream Deck. Stream Decks are made by Elgato, and are a special type of keyboard with programmable buttons that can display updatable icons. This Keyboard Maestro release finally tipped me to the point of purchasing a Stream Deck.

Keyboard Maestro is an awesome application for anyomne who wants to automate their Mac. One of the less commonly known features is that there’s actually a way built into the application to generate a picture of a Keyboard Maestro macro. The challenge of late for me has been that since finally moving to a Macbook Pro with a retina screen, the resulting macro images have been very large. Too large for reasonable sharing in an e-mail or document in fact. The solution? A Keyboard Maestro macro of course.

Last year, Keyboard Maestro 9 launched with official support for a piece of hardware known as the Elgato Stream Deck. Providing a set of dynamic buttons, the Stream Deck in conjunction with Keyboard Maestro fundamentally allows you to trigger macros from the Stream Deck’s buttons. This makes for a versatile and engaging set-up for anyone wishing to streamline their workflows and make them easily triggered. The integration through works through the use of a Stream Deck plug-in, but did you know you can use more than one Keyboard Maestro plug-in for the Stream Deck?

This week saw the public release of the i*OS app, LaunchCuts. It’s an app created to fill a gap in the functionality of the i*OS Shortcuts app. Specifically the challenges of trying to organise Shortcuts. It’s something I’ve covered before in my posts on smart folders for Workflow and in passing on a post about Shortcuts, my naming conventions for shortcuts. There are a few other bells and whistles to it, but the core function is simply that it allows you to organise shortcuts into folders for ease of launching and editing; albeit outside of the Shortcut app itself. The functionality it delivers is something I’ve been waiting on for several years, and in this post I’m going to share a little bit about how I’ve set it up.

The Elgato Stream Deck is a versatile piece of hardware that allows you to have dynamic buttons to trigger processes on your computer via the Stream Deck software. These can then trigger actions such as interacting with a piece of software insalled on your device, or even an online or network service, which in turn can do things like automatically update a social media profile, or turn on lighting in your home/office. Each button is programmable, even dynamically, to display text and images to illustrate the current purpose of a button. But where do the images that you can use come from, and where can you get them?

Working with shell scripting is in essence very similar to programming in a more traditional compile-to-run language. The key differences for me are the depth of access and that it is interpreted. On occasion the scripting commands available simply don’t do everything you might want in one simple to execute command, and so, just like any other areas of coding, you can go down the path of creating your own functions and shorthand. In this post I’m going to share a few functions I’m using for adding content to the Mac clipboard/pasteboard.

I’ve been a Google Chrome user for many years, but with my regular use of i*OS and spending more time using my Macbook Pro out and about, battery life management and sharing of bookmarked sites across device has become more important for my everyday use. As a result, I’ve been using Safari as my default Mac web browser. But there are a few tab management features that I was missing from Chrome, so a while back I set about adding those in using some of the tools I had at my disposal.