29 Mar 2015
Even with the advent of iOS8 and custom keyboards and customised keyboard lines in specific apps, one thing I still find myself wishing I could get on my iPhone and iPad keyboards is a tab key. Fortunately there is a nice easy way to work around this using one of my favourite iOS utilities - TextExpander Touch.
Read More21 Mar 2015
TextExpander is one of my most frequently used Mac utilities and I have all sorts of snippets that help me with all sorts of tasks. From correcting my seldom perfect typing and inserting standard sets of boilerplate text through to more advanced ones that produce fill-in forms and carry out conversions of clipboard text. This focus of this post certainly falls into the latter, but does so in doing something surprisingly simple. It takes plain text and simply adds HTML paragraph tags in at the appropriate locations.
Read More26 Feb 2015
Continuing with my little spate of sharing workflows for the iOS app known as Workflow, I’ve decided to share another simple action extension workflow that allows you to save web pages as a simplified style PDF Whilst I personally use Evernote as my snap shot repository and page cleaner of choice, sometimes I want to be able to send other people a snap shot of a page and Workflow provides a relatively easy way to do this.
Read More25 Feb 2015
I use various services for web pages I want to take a deeper look at later, Pocket and Evernote being my favourites for my personal reading. However I frequently come across things I want to take a look at more closely for my work. Rather than creating a task (which I’ll then probably defer ad infinitum) I choose the simpler option of mailing myself details of the page. Whilst this has never been a particularly onerous task I found that I could use the wonderfully flexible iOS app Workflow to help me make it even easier.
Read More24 Feb 2015
I continue to find great personal uses for the iOS app Workflow. One of the ones I’ve been experimenting with recently relates to quickly taking contextual notes and adding them into Evernote.
Read More18 Feb 2015
It’s amazing how many computers we all work with these days. Our phones, our tablets, work computers, personal computers, remote servers, Raspberry Pis; the list goes on. I frequently find myself wanting to action things on a computer other than the one in front of me and I now have another tool in my arsenal to do this … the iOS app Workflow.
Read More24 Jan 2015
I’ve been experimenting a lot recently with the iOS Workflow application and whilst it is an initial release it has a lot of power and a vast amount of potential. Whilst there are a number of features I’m hoping will be included in upcoming releases I have a few workflows that are already saving me some time and one of those relates to a site called jaymantri.com. The site offers up a set of photographs for download each week and when the e-mail comes to let me know they’re available I dutifully went to the site to download each of them from. But now with Workflow I can grab them from across the site with the push of a button.
Read More14 Jan 2015
Whilst experimenting and answering occasional Twitter questions relating to date manipulation in the iOS Workflow app I’ve created a few example workflows. These workflows are not intended to be stand alone workflows with a practical purpose, but simply as ways that the dates can be manipulated.
Date manipulation is a common requirement. You may need to extract elements of a date (e.g. the month) or rearrange to another format. You can use them for queries, web site links, file names and a myriad of other things. So getting an idea of how to do some manipulations in Workflow could potentially prove quite useful.
Read More11 Jan 2015
Late last year I was eagerly awaiting the release of a new iOS application that promised a new level of automation. Whilst I do like using Launch Center Pro, Drafts and Pythonista, Workflow promised something a little different and something that could complement these other tools nicely. I’m sure I’ll be sharing numerous workflows on this site as time goes by, but the first one I thought I’d share is one that you could say is a little bit meta. A workflow for duplicating workflows.
Read More10 Jan 2015
It’s the new year so once again it’s time to review the past 12 months and see what’s been going on at thoughtasylum.com and with me.
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