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05 Aug 2017
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.
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19 Jul 2017
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.
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24 Jun 2017
Workflow is a fantastic automation app for iOS that allows you to build sequences of actions to achieve some sort of repeatable ‘workflow’. This has benefits in saving you time, providing consistency and in some cases simply providing you with a way to actually do something that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to with the tools at your disposal. Whilst there is a synchronisation service available to keep workflows aligned across your iOS devices and there is a gallery of workflows available through the app it can be useful to share workflows directly with others. In this post, I’m going to quickly cover the primary options you have.
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30 May 2017
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
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29 Apr 2017
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.
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28 Mar 2017
XYplorer is my preferred file manager on Windows. It contains a large number of features that are just too enticing for someone like me to pass up so it came as little bit of a surprise to me when in its tab based interface I couldn’t find a way to quickly duplicate a tab. However XYplorer is a scriptable file manager so it was a pretty easy to create a solution.
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05 Mar 2017
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.
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19 Feb 2017
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.
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09 Jan 2017
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.
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06 Jan 2017
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.
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