Editing Large Amounts of Text in Shortcuts

26 Feb 2019

Last year I posted a small piece on text editing to the Automators forum. It was inspired by another post on the Drafts forum and focused on coming up with a way to edit text making more use of the screen estate than the paltry offering of the standard text options in Shortcuts. The premise was simply to enable a larger text editing area via Scriptable.

Launch Center Pro Shortcut Adder

13 Jan 2019

The latest iteration of the iOS app Launch Center Pro comes with an option to use a Shortcuts shortcut to add launchers for shortcuts to Launch Center Pro. It allows you to grab a shortcut from Shortcuts, and to set the launcher icon and the launch URL in Launch Center Pro. Very meta, and very cool. However, I have a lot of shortcuts. I’m often at the four figure mark, and it just doesn’t give me the ease of set-up I need, and also I often like to run my shortcuts via a shortcut launcher to speed things up. To that end, I took it upon myself to produce an enhanced version of the original shortcut.

Shortcuts: Quick Run

26 Dec 2018

Did you know there’s a way to speed up Shortcuts shortcuts on iOS? It’s really simple and can make a huge impact. Particularly on more complex shortcuts.

Getting to Grips with Launch Center Pro

20 Dec 2018

A few days ago over on the Automators podcast forum I answered a query about making use of the iOS app Launch Center Pro, which had recently been updated. The post was fairly extensive and received a lot of positive feedback. I herefore decided to paraphrase it here on my own web site as a reference for those who follow my writing.

The posting came about in response to queries from a couple of users about use cases and a general utlisation of the app and so, in response, I decided to share some details about what it does for me. It focuses on the fact that Launch Center Pro offers me some specific features that I find useful, but for some of these features there are certainly alternative approaches. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as different approaches suit different workflows and different mind sets. Based on that I set out the following assertion for everything that follows.

Launch Center Pro isn’t necessarily an app for everyone, but it can be an app for anyone, from novice through to advanced iOS user.

Shortcuts: Voice Controlled Options

30 Nov 2018

Shortcuts on iOS is a wonderfully versatile tool and I use it for a wide variety of things. Sometimes I even use it hands free as Shortcuts support Siri trigger words. Unfortunately, the shortcut’s subsequent interaction tends to be rather one way unless you are able to access your device’s keyboard. But it is just a tendency. Shortcuts can still interact with you on basic decision making operations and I use this in a number of shortcuts, including, most notably, a briefing routine that not only varies by time of day, but allows me to customise the content as it runs.

In this post I’m going to show you the basic building blocks for how this works.

Making Sense of the 2018 Q4 SAP SuccessFactors Update

22 Nov 2018

We’re fast approaching the end of the year and so it’s time for SAP to roll-out the last of their SAP SuccessFactors HCM product suite quarterly updates for the period. In Preview systems at the moment it seems SAP have been pushing as hard as ever to get some great updates out to clients.

As ever, my colleagues and I at Zalaris have been taking apart the information about the release and figuring out what’s actually important, and what has the greatest benefit potential for the customers. There’s certainly been a lot of new and interesting updates to pick through, so it’s a pretty jam packed review overall.

Q4 2018 : SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Centre - Quarterly Review

20 Nov 2018

As 2018 draws to a close, SAP is set to release a good range of feature updates to Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) users. While information on Ask HR is oddly scarce, there’s plenty of Cloud for Customer updates to keep everyone very happy.

Scriptable: Clipboard URL to Markdown Link

02 Nov 2018

With the move from Workflow to Shortcuts, I’ve come a little unstuck with a new issue around sharing them on iOS. Previously, if I wanted to get the name of a workflow and it’s URL in a Markdown link format, I could use a workflow to grab the title of the download page of the URL, which would match to the name of the workflow. After that it was just a case of wrapping the details in some Markdown syntax and we were done. Unfortunately that approach doesn’t work any more, but I have come up with a workaround utilising Scriptable.

Automators 7 Shout Out

29 Sep 2018

I occasionally get mentions on my favourite podcasts, and it was a lovely surprise to hear my name mentioned on Episode 7 of the relatively new Automators podcast.

Shortcuts: Using IFTTT

18 Sep 2018

Back in the Workflow days, the iOS app allowed for the triggering of IFTTT actions via a special Workflow recipe action trigger. While it worked, I actually found it quite cumbersome to configure. As a result I switched to using the IFTTT web hook trigger for triggering IFTTT actions. It turns out that in the move to Shortcuts, the app that Workflow evolved into, support for IFTTT was dropped, so I figured I’d share how to do the web hook triggering as that’s still viable.