Prefix DEVONthink Item Name with Date Stamp

16 Jan 2022

Anyone who has been following my efforts over the last few months may have noted that I have occasionally made reference to migrating from Evernote to DEVONthink. As part of that move I have been taking the opportunity to sort out some of my lax filing. One of those aspects is the naming of files and specifically the inclusion of date stamps where relevant - e.g. on bills, documentation releases, etc. Fortunately I was able to bring a little bit of automation to bear on this activity, which has been helping speed things up significantly.

Move Last Download to Current Finder Folder

24 Dec 2021

In my day job, I work on Windows, and XYplorer is my file manager of choice due to it’s configurability and extensibility through scripting. One of my most used extensions is one which will move the last downloaded file to the directory in the currently focused XYplorer pane. I have written about a very similar XYplorer script in the past that works in the same way, but rather than the last download, it grabs a copy of the last screenshot I took.

Recently I realised I was missing this functionality over on my Mac, and so I decided to redress the imbalance through a little scripting.

The Ubiquitous Linking Manifesto

17 Dec 2021

Yesterday, I was catching up on some reading and I came across something rather exciting - The Ubiquitous Linking Manifesto. This might first sound like something written for a rather out there UK political party, but it is a set of logical recommendations for something that is becoming ever more important in a world so dependent upon digital information and action.

A Keyboard Maestro Plugin for Apple Shortcuts

05 Dec 2021

With the public release of macOS Monterey, I have been trying out a few ways of interacting with Shortcuts from a number of automation tools. Shortcuts can be triggered on macOS using AppleScript or shell script, both of which are relatively easy to do with the Swiss Army knife of Mac automation, Keyboard Maestro. However, I thought it would be fun to create a convenience plugin to make it even easier to integrate Keyboard Maestro with Shortcuts.

Bypass - Shortcuts Support for Stream Deck

04 Dec 2021

A few weeks ago I released version 1 of an Alfred workflow called Bypass. I created it to help use Apple’s Shortcuts app on the Mac. I have been continuing to expand the functionality, and have now released v1.1 with many new features.

One of the areas I spent a bit of time working on was a way to make Shortcuts easier to use with the Elgato Stream Deck, and in this post I’m going to walk through how Bypass now supports setting up Shortcuts on the Stream Deck.

Micro:Bit - Light Strip

28 Nov 2021

Last year I decided to spruce up my home office for Christmas a little bit, by using an LED light strip around the cupboard door that sits behind my desk. Rather than just using an off the shelf solution, I used a couple of BBC Micro:Bits (aka BBC MicroBit), to control the lighting effects and to provide a remote control. In this post I’m going to cover how I did this.

Automating Adding Screenshots to Blog Posts

23 Nov 2021

When I am writing blog posts for this web site, I frequently need to take screenshots on my Mac and put them into the relevant assets directory to enable them to be included in my post. While I had a way of doing this that was relatively quick and easy, I found that I always needed to subsequently rename the screenshot to something meaningful and in a format that conformed to my naming standards. I recently addressed this by developing my workflow a little and creating something new in the process.

Drafts - Transcluding Drafts

20 Nov 2021

Over the past year or two, transclusion is a topic that has come up several times in the Drafts forum, particularly in the context of other apps for personal knowledge management (PKM), such as Obsidian, Roam Research and Logseq to name just a few. In this post I’m going to talk a little about what transclusion is and how you can include some of the functionality in Drafts.

H2 2021 : SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Centre

19 Nov 2021

With the seasons changing again, it is time to take another look at the developments in SAP SuccessFactors. In this post, I am taking my regular dive into what is new with one of SAP’s less well known SuccessFactors solutions, Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC).

For those who are unfamiliar with ECSC, it is an HR service desk solution. It provides a back-office system to allow HR service agents to process and manage tickets raised by employees. Employees can submit tickets by telephone, e-mail, text chat or via a web portal. The solution is built on SuccessFactors Employee Central for the employee information and the service functionality of SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) for ticket processing. An SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) application known as Ask HR provides the employee web portal.

In this release, we will look at the usual updates in C4C and Ask HR that affect ECSC users, but I am also going to take a slight diversion to discuss the direction of SAP’s development of C4C that will no doubt have an impact as to how ECSC will develop.

Drafts Syntax Development Tip

13 Nov 2021

Earlier this year, Drafts version 26 was released with support for custom syntaxes and themes. Syntaxes are used within the Drafts editor to specify the look and in-app behaviours of the content. Themes are used within the Drafts editor to specify how the editor interface is displayed. The two work closely together.

For example you may have a syntax for lists where the syntax is configured to allow you to toggle a single character check mark at the end of a line. The theme could then specify what colour a checked line is and what colour an unchecked line is.

I have been experimenting in a bit more depth with this functionality over the last couple of months, and I want to share a little tip I have been using in speeding up my theme development process.