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27 Sep 2020
Back in July of this year (2020), I released the first version of the TADpoLe library for Mac app Drafts, and with it the ThoughtAsylum action group. It was the culmination of very slowly taking two years of action creation and bundling it up for others to make use of. Only two months later and things have had to undergo what has been a pretty significant change.
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16 Aug 2020
XYplorer is one of my favourite Windows apps and it has been a little while since I’ve shared anything about how I’m using it. So, when I added a new script this week that uses 7-Zip I thought I’d draft a quick post about it along with a related script also using 7-Zip.
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14 Aug 2020
SuccessFactors may be on bi-annual releases, but SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) continues apace on its quarterly-release cycle. Since Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC), the SuccessFactors solution for running an HR service desk uses this system as its service back-end system. It means that ECSC users continue to receive updates every quarter. In this release, SAP is releasing several home page-related updates, which may be an indicator of things to come given how under-utilised this area of C4C has been in the past. Along with this, there are ticket processing updates, some features to please the administrators, and of course, some additions around reporting and analytics.
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25 Jul 2020
When developing JavaScript for drafts, logging to the console or using well-placed alerts and other visual indicators can be useful for what is going on, but a more advanced logging solution can make things much easier. The latest update to the ThoughtAsylum Drafts Library includes a new class that provides functionality to help Drafts action creators with their testing.
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18 Jul 2020
I’ve recently been working on a new project (more on that soon I hope), where I have been titling content. My use of consistent styling for titling of various blog posts and the like has pobably been less than consistent, so I figure that this was a good opportunity to have a got at turning that around. The Chicago Manual of Style choice of titling ruless seemed pretty good and so I’ve gone with that, but consistency is key and ease of use is required, so here’s a little Mac automation using Keyboard Maestro that sorts it all out for me.
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16 Jul 2020
When I’m creating Drafts actions and testing them out, I quite often need test data to work with. Rather than creating test data each time, I figured I should sort out some standard test data. While I could certainly have used a tool like TextExpander, which Drafts notably supports natively on i*OS, I decided instead to roll it into some actions, and in this post I’m going to explain a little bit about that and how you can make use of them too.
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14 Jul 2020
While I definitely tested the update mechanism for the ThoughtAsylum Drafts Library, somehow between testing and release a small change crept in that has resulted in at least one user (probably more) not being able to easily refresh the library, which is part of the ThoughtAsylum Action Group set-up. Fixes are already in place in the libary and the action group. Users having issues should update the action group to the latest version from the action directory and run the usual update and refresh action.
Should that not work, please download and run this action which will force an update of the settings JSON file and directly download the library file to the expected library file name, regardless of what is specified in the settings. It utilises the embedded TADpoLe library in the TAD-Library action, so it is necessary to have a version of the ThoughtAsylum Action Group available.
14 Jul 2020
Drafts has a hugely powerful area known as action. Actions are made available through action entries in the action list that can be displayed down one side of the user interface. Actions can also be displayed via an action bar, effectively a toolbar of actions, and can of course be triggered by shortcuts. Yesterday I described an option I referred to as slash commands that could be used to trigger actions, and today I’m going to show how you can in effect overload one action to give you a choice of several.
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13 Jul 2020
Slash commands are something that I think rose to prominence through the Slack collaboration platform. They are a way of invoking commands by entering a forward slash character followed by a string of text into. Effectively a quick entry method. I figured this could be useful for me in Drafts, and so wrote something to do it.
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12 Jul 2020
The Drafts application is an amazing tool for capturing and working with text. One of its greatest strengths comes from its extensibility through its actions system. And certainly one of the most powerful action steps is the Script action step which allows you to program actions in JavaScript utilising much of the core iOS JavaScript engine and interfaces into the Drafts app itself.
I have a few things that I do to make it easier for me to work with JavaScript in Drafts, and I’m going to share some of them in this post.
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