25 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.
Read More31 Dec 2014
Like many of us, the Internet is my go to place for immediate access information. It allows me to quickly research topics via my web browser, but for more involved topics it can be difficult for me to get enough detail in a single sitting, or I may need to pass on some details elsewhere (e.g. a reference list for a document/post/article). But when I have several tabs open (potentially across several windows) it can be a pain to manually list out the links and pages. To that end I created an AppleScript based TextExpander snippet to produce such a list.
Read More30 Nov 2014
There are many options these days for carrying out ad hoc calculations. Personally I ditched the desktop calculator as soon as I got a personal computer for my day to day work - after all a computer is a very capable calculator. But that left me with various options of how to carry out a calculation. On the Mac there’s the calculator app and following in the steps of launchers like Alfred even Spotlight allows you to carry out quick calculations. If you have a browser open you could even tap into the calculation potential of engines such as Google search of Wolfram-Alpha. However in order to retain my clipboard and tap into something that allowed for some more complex calculations I created a TextExpander snippet to help with this.
Read More29 Oct 2014
A little while back I spent a bit of time investigating some domain names for a project I was working on. As you may know, you can see all sorts of useful information about a domain by looking up it’s Who Is record. In order to save time I came up with a couple of TextExpander snippets to help with that.
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