Stream Deck Icons

12 Jan 2020

The Elgato Stream Deck is a versatile piece of hardware that allows you to have dynamic buttons to trigger processes on your computer via the Stream Deck software. These can then trigger actions such as interacting with a piece of software insalled on your device, or even an online or network service, which in turn can do things like automatically update a social media profile, or turn on lighting in your home/office. Each button is programmable, even dynamically, to display text and images to illustrate the current purpose of a button. But where do the images that you can use come from, and where can you get them?

LaunchCuts Folder Set-up

12 Jan 2020

This week saw the public release of the i*OS app, LaunchCuts. It’s an app created to fill a gap in the functionality of the i*OS Shortcuts app. Specifically the challenges of trying to organise Shortcuts. It’s something I’ve covered before in my posts on smart folders for Workflow and in passing on a post about Shortcuts, my naming conventions for shortcuts. There are a few other bells and whistkles to it, but the core function is simply that it allows you to organise shortcuts into folders for ease of launching and editing; albeit outside of the Shortcut app itself. The functionality it delivers is something I’ve been waiting on for several years, and in this post I’m going to share a little bit about how I’ve set it up.

Keyboard Maestro Plugins for the Elgato Stream Deck

11 Jan 2020

Last year, Keyboard Maestro 9 launched with official support for a piece of hardware known as the Elgato Stream Deck. Providing a set of dynamic buttons, the Stream Deck in conjunction with Keyboard Maestro fundamentally allows you to trigger macros from the Stream Deck’s buttons. This makes for a versatile and engaging set-up for anyone wishing to streamline their workflows and make them easily triggered. The integration through works through the use of a Stream Deck plug-in, but did you know you can use more than one Keyboard Maestro plug-in for the Stream Deck?

Keyboard Maestro Macro Image Resizer

05 Jan 2020

Keyboard Maestro is an awesome application for anyomne who wants to automate their Mac. One of the less commonly known features is that there’s actually a way built into the application to generate a picture of a Keyboard Maestro macro. The challenge of late for me has been that since finally moving to a Macbook Pro with a retina screen, the resulting macro images have been very large. Too large for reasonable sharing in an e-mail or document in fact. The solution? A Keyboard Maestro macro of course.

Introducing the Stream Deck

03 Jan 2020

Last year, Keyboard Maestro 9 was released, and with it, official support for a piece of hardware called a Stream Deck. Stream Decks are made by Elgato, and are a special type of keyboard with programmable buttons that can display updatable icons. This Keyboard Maestro release finally tipped me to the point of purchasing a Stream Deck.

Shortcuts Collection

16 Dec 2019

The Workflow app was an amazing gateway app for automation on iOS when it first appeared, and I’ve been using it since its very first release. It built on x-callback URLs and revolutionised the way people can interact with their handheld Apple devices. After it’s acquisition by Apple, the app eveolved into Shortcuts, and in 2019 underwent major developments with the introduction of third party donations through actions and advanced intents as well as automation and parameters.

Now that the ThoughtAsylum web site update is in place, I’ve turned what attention I can spare to some addtional projects; one of which is a new and ongoing collection of shortcuts.

Q4 2019 : SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Centre - Quarterly Review

03 Dec 2019

In the final release of 2019, SAP are bringing quite a few useful updates to their SuccessFactors HR helpdesk solution. These range from speed and efficiency improvements through to significant enhancements of existing functionality. It’s a release that introduces something for every Employee Central Service Centre user, be they a service agent, a service manager, or an employee.

As usual I’ll split things up into updates around the service agent facing part of the solution (Cloud for Customer, C4C), and the employee facing part of the solution (Ask HR).

Site Update

26 Nov 2019

If you have visited thoughtasylum.com much in the past, you may have noticed a change recently. The site has been rebuilt. It isn’t just a makeover, it’s actually a rebuild from the ground-up. In this post I’m going to givealittle bit of background to the what, why and how.

Shortcuts and Modulo Calculations

28 Oct 2019

The i*OS Shortcuts application has a surprising amount of numerical functions tucked away within its calculation actions. These include not only statistical functions, but also some arithmetic functions familiar to many programmers. One of these is the modulus function. Many of you may have used this in your mathematical studies at school. It is frequently used as the basis for time calculations on 12 and 24 hour clocks. But there’s more than one way to apply a modulus.

Shortcuts: Extract Contact's Mobile Phone Number

10 Sep 2019

Recently there was a query on the Automators podcast forum, where someone wanted to know how to retrieve a mobile phone number from a contact using Shortcuts. This isn’t something that Shortcuts supports “out-of-the-box”, but it is something that Shortcuts can do with a bit of cajoling. In this post I’ll explain some of the details about one way of doing it.