ThoughtAsylum

A couple of weeks ago I was involved in researching some iOS applications for a potential business need to connect iPads and iPhones to some internal systems. Some third party apps existed that would allow the access, but as part of the comparison price was a consideration only for every search I did on Google I got the US app store (and I’m not in the US).

TextExpander by Smile software is available for the Mac (OS X) and for iOS devices. It allows you to define snippets of text that can be inserted into another application (any on Mac, only compatible ones on iOS) by either selection from the TextExpander menu or by entering a user defined abbreviation. The application allows for some quite sophisticated macro and script based snippets to be built, and can save you a good deal of time and typing. Whilst many snippet might be quite personal (e.g. e-mail signatures), some snippets might be useful to lots of people and fortunately there are some easy ways to share them with others.

Recently I was contacted by Stephan Heuel about a new online application he had created. I’ve written several posts about how you might want to use Evernote files saved to a local machine (or attached storage) as the basis for template notes. These have involved editing the note files in a text editor to produce various effects. Even changing the background colour of a note in Evernote. It was this post that inspired Stephan to think - what if you could edit them in-place, online?

The other day I needed to trawl through a rather unappealing log file. Over 18,000 lines and over 12,000 occurrences of the word error. A quick scan of the log showed that the vast majority of these were more a warning than a significant error. However I knew the error I was looking for was in there somewhere. I decided that I needed to weed out the non-error lines before I even started to tackle this one. I remembered that the stream editor (SED) utility in UNIX was ideal for this sort of thing so I had a look to see how I could apply this in Windows.

On Windows I have a useful function in one of my text editors that takes some text and converts the case - to upper case, lower case or sentence case. I realised that on the Mac I could use TextExpander to carry out these functions, so if you’re a TextExpander user and want to have this functionality available to you, I’ve provided some details and a downloadable snippet group for you to use.

Each day I access Twitter using a variety of platforms and whilst I find that the clients I use are workable, none of them quite matches up to my ideal. I thought I’d share my top 10 wants from a Twitter client just in case someone knows of an existing Twitter client that meets these criteria or even wants to create a client that meets all of them.

I recently had an e-mail about one of my posts on Evernote templates on Windows. I’ve previously recommended using an application launcher to provide a list of evernote imports, but the e-mail was asking if there was an easier way to import templates directly? Well as it happens there is.

For some time now I’ve been hampered by Evernote’s e-mail in service. Let me re-phrase that; I’ve been hampered by the limitations of e-mail in making the best use of Evernote’s e-mail in service. Now however, I’ve found a service that lets me overcome the limitations and open up a wide range of opportunities for today and unimaginable ones for the future.

Recently I’ve been doing some work with Excel to carry out some time calculations based on the results of an automated job. The job is sometimes triggered one night and finishes in the early hours of the next morning. After loading the figures into Excel I discovered that time calculations aren’t always as simple as subtraction when times cross midnight. A quick test later and I had a workable solution that I thought might be useful to share.

I use my iPhone for keeping up to date on a number of social media platforms. It’s how I consume news and what’s going on in my areas of interest. I’ve pretty much abandoned RSS feeds these days for the curated content of Twitter, and I now would find it had to operate as effectively without my nice ordered Twitter lists. The problem is the information I often require is in linked to articles and posts. This involves my Twitter client either using it’s internal browser or spawning out into mobile Safari. Not too bad in the main, but some sites are poorly formatted for mobile browsing. Either I get a desktop experience crammed onto a tiny screen or a poorly styled (usually some odd WordPress theme) mobile page that doesn’t actually let me scroll the whole article onto the screen. Clearly what’s needed is a better mobile web browser.

When I’m working on Windows one of the applications I really miss from the Mac is TextExpander. I’m not the world’s greatest typist and being able to auto correct words I commonly mistype (I can spell by the way - it’s just typing I have issues with) as well as being able to quickly enter common phrases (a.k.a. boiler plate text) is a real boon for me. Fortunately I came upon AutoHotKey - a fantastic free utility that is capable of creating these text based replacements. I’ve been using it for a while now and it occurred to me I haven’t actually shared any of the things I do with it. That’s about to change.

So this post is just a quick tip for anyone getting started with AutoHotKey. Whilst editing an AHK script, you probably often find you need to reload the script into AutoHotKey. Whilst this is available from the application icon in the notification area, it seems ludicrous to have to do for an application called AutoHotKey - why not trigger a reload with a key press? Well the answer’s in the help file…

Clearly is a browser add-on created by the team at Evernote. It allows you to reformat the content of a web page into a cleaner simpler one for easier reading (like Readability) and of course also integrates seamlessly into Evernote. This application fits my way of consuming and saving interesting articles almost (see later) perfectly and I thought I’d share with you a few features you may not be so familiar with.

Visualisation is a powerful tool for conveying information in a succinct and digestable manner. In business we see diagrams versus narrative text and bullet points on a daily basis, but have you ever stopped to really consider why this is and why data visualisation in particular is such a key part of modern business? Before we dive in I’d like you to take a few moments to consider a few questions.

SAP Org Visualization by Nakisa (SOVN) OrgChart allows you to visualise the hierarchical structure of an organisation based on HCM data held in SAP. It is the foundation of the SAP Org Visualization by Nakisa solution extension and can be installed for a variety of reasons.

When it comes to SAP Visualization Solutions by Nakisa (VSN), the log file is king. It is the source of information about all the transactions and activities carried out. In my first few weeks working with SAP VSN products I was quickly made aware of just how significant the CDS (Corporate Directory Services) log is and it is the foundation to solving at least a good 90% of issues encountered when configuring VSN applications.

A little under a year ago I joined the world of SAP. I’ve been working in IT for some time now in a wide variety of roles, but it is only relatively recently that I’ve entered into the mysterious and at times daunting world of SAP. Whilst I have experienced and helpful colleagues I can call upon for assistance they are not my only source of the latest SAP related information.

In my first blog post in this series on contributing to SCN I wrote about making the decision to contribute to the SAP Community Network (SCN). In this blog post I’m going to take a look at some of the ways in which you can contribute to SCN. From what might qualify as a contribution, through to the different ways and mediums that SCN can allow you to create and publish your contributions. Finally we’ll take a look at some ideas for the sorts of things you might like to consider for your next or even first contribution.

If you’ve been following my previous posts on whether you should contribute to SCN and how you can contribute to SCN I would hope that by now you have made some sort of commitment to yourself that you will be adding some great content in the very near future. However there’s something I haven’t discussed yet and that’s about how much to contribute.

Creating something new is one of the most rewarding things you can do and for the last few days I’ve been posting about why, what and how to do just that on the SAP Community Network (SCN). In this post I’m going to take a look at some examples of things we can all do to improve the content we see on SCN. Whilst it isn’t an exhaustive list by any means (that would be impossible) and whilst you may in fact do all of these things I hope there’s at least one thing in here that can help improve what we have.

I hope at least some of you have been following my posts of the last week about contributing to SCN. In this my final post in the series I thought I’d just wrap things up with a bit of a summary of what’s come before, some background to the series and something a little special that I hope all of you will take the opportunity to join in.

A little while back I was scanning through some questions on Quora when I spotted one relating to Evernote that I thought I could help with.  The question was “Is there a shortcut to copy the note URL in Evernote on Windows”….

I’m a big fan of AutoHotKey a great scriptable automation tool for Windows and I use it for a number of things. One of these is to quickly access favourite files and folders.

I spend a fair bit of my time checking the results of automated jobs over the course of a few days for different clients. As a result I frequently ended up creating temporary folders for several days in a row and naming them with the current date. After a few weeks the penny dropped and I decided to automate the process a little.

It was mainly this last factor that was the driver behind my particular recent use, but it really is amazing what can be done with such scripts and there are a lot of great resources out there that show you how to do some pretty incredible things.

Whilst storage is continuing to get cheaper all the time I occasionally find myself needing to save some space. Usually where some cloud storage and archiving of old material is involved. ZIP files are very convenient for compressing files, but sometimes I need to go a step further. In these cases I opt for the 7z archive file format used in the free and portable software 7-Zip as I’ve always ended up with a smaller archive file.

I spend a lot of my time working with Word documents and Excel spreadsheets - it’s in the nature of what I do. I frequently found that I need to create PDF copies of these files (to send out to clients) and eventually I grew tired of having to open the files one by one and select to save each as a PDF. As a result I created a bit of VBScript to automatically convert files for me (in Windows).

After the recent gradings I was asked the perennial question by one of my students - “Which side do my mons go on?”. So I thought this was worth writing a little piece about.

Like most bloggers I’m hoping I’ll get a lot more blogging done in 2013. However I thought this would be a good time to cover a few changes and the top items on thoughtasylum.com for 2012.

2013 got off to a great start for me - I was selected from millions of people as the SAP Community Network’s Member of the Month. The SAP Community Network (SCN for short) is the online network for SAP professionals. It has well over two and a half million members and for one month only I’ve been highlighted as one of the community’s star members by being interviewed and having pride of place in the “MoM” corner on the SCN home page :-)