Drafts: TADpoLe Library Refresh Fix

14 Jul 2020

While I definitely tested the update mechanism for the ThoughtAsylum Drafts Library, somehow between testing and release a small change crept in that has resulted in at least one user (probably more) not being able to easily refresh the library, which is part of the ThoughtAsylum Action Group set-up. Fixes are already in place in the library and the action group. Users having issues should update the action group to the latest version from the action directory and run the usual update and refresh action.

Should that not work, please download and run this action which will force an update of the settings JSON file and directly download the library file to the expected library file name, regardless of what is specified in the settings. It utilises the embedded TADpoLe library in the TAD-Library action, so it is necessary to have a version of the ThoughtAsylum Action Group available.

Drafts: Action Sets

14 Jul 2020

Drafts has a hugely powerful area known as action. Actions are made available through action entries in the action list that can be displayed down one side of the user interface. Actions can also be displayed via an action bar, effectively a toolbar of actions, and can of course be triggered by shortcuts. Yesterday I described an option I referred to as slash commands that could be used to trigger actions, and today I’m going to show how you can in effect overload one action to give you a choice of several.

Drafts: Slash Command

13 Jul 2020

Slash commands are something that I think rose to prominence through the Slack collaboration platform. They are a way of invoking commands by entering a forward slash character followed by a string of text into. Effectively a quick entry method. I figured this could be useful for me in Drafts, and so wrote something to do it.

Drafts: Script Development

12 Jul 2020

The Drafts application is an amazing tool for capturing and working with text. One of its greatest strengths comes from its extensibility through its actions system. And certainly one of the most powerful action steps is the Script action step which allows you to program actions in JavaScript utilising much of the core iOS JavaScript engine and interfaces into the Drafts app itself.

I have a few things that I do to make it easier for me to work with JavaScript in Drafts, and I’m going to share some of them in this post.

Drafts: Exploded Markdown Preview

11 Jul 2020

With the introduction of the TADpoLe library, I’m able to share an action via the ThoughtAsylum Drafts action group that I think a lot of people who write for the web may find useful. It’s a special web preview action that incorporates a number of features that I think make it pretty special. Welcome to my explanation of the “Exploded Markdown Preview”.

Introducing TADpoLe

10 Jul 2020

I’ve been a user of the Drafts app for many years, and while I have written some posts and regularly try to help people out on the Drafts forum, I’m quite excited to be sharing the first of a couple of bigger Drafts related projects I’ve been working on. In fact this one has effectively been years in the making, and is finally in a form where I think it is fit for sharing; though time will tell as to how true that really is. One can never truly tell until that first step is taken. Today, I’m releasing something called “TADpoLe”.

Setting up SSH for Shortcuts

01 Jun 2020

A few months back I posted some instructions on the Automators podcast forums that I thought it would be worth re-posting here as it seems there are quite a few people out there who would like to utilise Shortcuts to control their computers from the command line. Which of course is an admirable endeavour.

Github Pages Post Scheduling

27 May 2020

Back in November last year, I finally made the switch away from SquareSpace to Jekyll and Github Pages. One of the changes for the worse that I highlighted in that was the lack of scheduling of posts. SquareSpace’s functionality enabled me to create posts in advance to be published at some point in the future. This allowed me a hands-off way to create content in advance that could be automatically spread over a period of time. It was the number one thing that I missed, and I said at the time that it was something I hoped to return to.

In this post I’m going to cover the solution I’m using to schedule posts.

SuccessFactors H1 2020 Release Analysis

26 May 2020

SAP have begun a new phasing for their 2020 releases by moving to a biannual release. Unfortunately, much like everything else, the COVID-19 global pandemic has put a little bit of a kink in the plans. In an attempt to accommodate customers who were hit hardest by the pandemic, SAP has extended the systems preview phase of the release by three weeks to give organisations more time to try and get the requisite testing carried out. The release to preview systems occurred on the weekend of 15 April 2020, and the release to production systems will now take place on the weekend of 5 June 2020.

But what does the H1 release bring? Does it bring two quarter’s worth of features? Perhaps a little more since SAP haven’t had to support a Q1 release? Well, if the raw figures are anything to go by, in comparison to last year it is actually fewer. But here’s the thing. There are quite a few big features. I suspect the complexity of some of the features is also something to be considered. SAP have had longer to work on SuccessFactors, uninterrupted by other releases, so perhaps this has simply given them the opportunity to pick off some of the bigger tasks? It still doesn’t quite fit to the last roadmap I saw, and we have seen various challenges pop-up in the last few months, not the least of which is COVID-19. I suspect the truth is that there have been many mitigating factors that have resulted in SAP brining forward fewer changes than we would have perhaps initially expected, but I promise you, there are quite a few in this release that have been well worth the wait.

H1 2020 : SuccessFactors Employee Central Service Centre

25 May 2020

It may be the first SuccessFactors release of 2020, but we are already up to the second release for Employee Central Service Centre, as Cloud for Customer (C4C) remains on a quarterly release cycle. In this release, it is like someone opened the flood gates on “useful for Employee Central Service Centre users” ideas and we had a barrage of updates and improvements that would take me an article easily twice as big to cover. I usually drop the features that are least likely to be useful. In this release, I have had to use a higher bar in making the selection of what to write about. Inevitably, this has resulted in a much higher number of features than usual being relegated to obscurity. And you know what? That is great!

In this release, there is a considerable amount of value to be taken up. As a result, in this article, I’ll be running through what I see as the key changes. Once you have everything from the article in hand and under consideration, if you do have time, go and dig a little deeper into SAP’s release notes for C4C (due for release mid-May on the SAP Customer Experience Wiki). There are a whole host of user interface changes that are going to make the lives of your service agents and administrators that much easier.

With that in mind, I will kick off with a look at Cloud for Customer and some updates to the ubiquitous communication channel of e-mail.