Software History

Many people who have to give presentations ask that questions be saved until the end. This lets them maintain the flow of the presentation and gives a nice interactive way to round off the session. This approach then mean that in order to reference back to a slide the presenter then has to page back and forth through the presentation. This is mentally cumbersome for the presenter to remember where in the slide deck the relevant slide is. For presentations with a large number of slides this can also be time consuming. But there is a better way….

Like 99% of the planet I hate junk email (a.k.a. spam). In the past I had to give up on one e-mail account as I received almost 1,000 junk e-mails per day. I’m very protective of my e-mail address and I refuse to put it out on the Internet. I’d like to recount a tale of woe and PDFs and an experiment I’m about to undertake in obfuscating e-mail addresses.

Have you ever created a service in OS X using Automator only to realise later on that you need to rename the service to something more meaningful? There’s no services manager application to do this for you, but there is still a relatively easy way to do this.

Evernote is my ubiquitous deposit spot for the overflow from my brain and everyday (unlike my brain) it grows in size. Being able to access the information held in Evernote in as easy a manner as possible is a key part of the way I work and I recently wrote a little script to make it that little bit better. The script allows me to search Evernote from Alfred (a keyboard driven app launcher on my Mac) which is always just a hot key away.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing in Microsoft Word 2007 recently and each document I’ve produced needs to be saved as a PDF. Fortunately this version of Word offers a nice plugin feature to do just that. However it’s several clicks to do and I wanted to see if I could make it any quicker.

At the time of writing, this new version of Alfred really is hot off the keyboard. It may be by the time you’re reading this post that the new features are on general release, but if not I grabbed my copy of Alfred 0.9.9 dev 1 build from the dev download page. The feature you’re going to need available is that of importing an extension in order to use this Evernote Search.

One of the big advantages of using an Android phone is the open nature of the platform and as a result of this you can change the default keyboard on your device to be something other than the standard Android keyboard on one bundled by a hardware manufacturer or reseller (e.g. cell company). One of the options out there is Swype which is a keyboard option where instead of tapping away at keys you can swipe your finger between them and the keyboard will take a guess at what you were aiming to type. It’s nice and fast and currently my preferred keyboard option for my HTC Desire Android phone. The problem is it doesn’t always work as expected.

A couple of weeks ago I was involved in researching some iOS applications for a potential business need to connect iPads and iPhones to some internal systems. Some third party apps existed that would allow the access, but as part of the comparison price was a consideration only for every search I did on Google I got the US app store (and I’m not in the US).

TextExpander by Smile software is available for the Mac (OS X) and for iOS devices. It allows you to define snippets of text that can be inserted into another application (any on Mac, only compatible ones on iOS) by either selection from the TextExpander menu or by entering a user defined abbreviation. The application allows for some quite sophisticated macro and script based snippets to be built, and can save you a good deal of time and typing. Whilst many snippet might be quite personal (e.g. e-mail signatures), some snippets might be useful to lots of people and fortunately there are some easy ways to share them with others.

Recently I was contacted by Stephan Heuel about a new online application he had created. I’ve written several posts about how you might want to use Evernote files saved to a local machine (or attached storage) as the basis for template notes. These have involved editing the note files in a text editor to produce various effects. Even changing the background colour of a note in Evernote. It was this post that inspired Stephan to think - what if you could edit them in-place, online?

The other day I needed to trawl through a rather unappealing log file. Over 18,000 lines and over 12,000 occurrences of the word error. A quick scan of the log showed that the vast majority of these were more a warning than a significant error. However I knew the error I was looking for was in there somewhere. I decided that I needed to weed out the non-error lines before I even started to tackle this one. I remembered that the stream editor (SED) utility in UNIX was ideal for this sort of thing so I had a look to see how I could apply this in Windows.

On Windows I have a useful function in one of my text editors that takes some text and converts the case - to upper case, lower case or sentence case. I realised that on the Mac I could use TextExpander to carry out these functions, so if you’re a TextExpander user and want to have this functionality available to you, I’ve provided some details and a downloadable snippet group for you to use.

Each day I access Twitter using a variety of platforms and whilst I find that the clients I use are workable, none of them quite matches up to my ideal. I thought I’d share my top 10 wants from a Twitter client just in case someone knows of an existing Twitter client that meets these criteria or even wants to create a client that meets all of them.

I recently had an e-mail about one of my posts on Evernote templates on Windows. I’ve previously recommended using an application launcher to provide a list of evernote imports, but the e-mail was asking if there was an easier way to import templates directly? Well as it happens there is.

For some time now I’ve been hampered by Evernote’s e-mail in service. Let me re-phrase that; I’ve been hampered by the limitations of e-mail in making the best use of Evernote’s e-mail in service. Now however, I’ve found a service that lets me overcome the limitations and open up a wide range of opportunities for today and unimaginable ones for the future.

Recently I’ve been doing some work with Excel to carry out some time calculations based on the results of an automated job. The job is sometimes triggered one night and finishes in the early hours of the next morning. After loading the figures into Excel I discovered that time calculations aren’t always as simple as subtraction when times cross midnight. A quick test later and I had a workable solution that I thought might be useful to share.

I use my iPhone for keeping up to date on a number of social media platforms. It’s how I consume news and what’s going on in my areas of interest. I’ve pretty much abandoned RSS feeds these days for the curated content of Twitter, and I now would find it had to operate as effectively without my nice ordered Twitter lists. The problem is the information I often require is in linked to articles and posts. This involves my Twitter client either using it’s internal browser or spawning out into mobile Safari. Not too bad in the main, but some sites are poorly formatted for mobile browsing. Either I get a desktop experience crammed onto a tiny screen or a poorly styled (usually some odd WordPress theme) mobile page that doesn’t actually let me scroll the whole article onto the screen. Clearly what’s needed is a better mobile web browser.

When I’m working on Windows one of the applications I really miss from the Mac is TextExpander. I’m not the world’s greatest typist and being able to auto correct words I commonly mistype (I can spell by the way - it’s just typing I have issues with) as well as being able to quickly enter common phrases (a.k.a. boiler plate text) is a real boon for me. Fortunately I came upon AutoHotKey - a fantastic free utility that is capable of creating these text based replacements. I’ve been using it for a while now and it occurred to me I haven’t actually shared any of the things I do with it. That’s about to change.

So this post is just a quick tip for anyone getting started with AutoHotKey. Whilst editing an AHK script, you probably often find you need to reload the script into AutoHotKey. Whilst this is available from the application icon in the notification area, it seems ludicrous to have to do for an application called AutoHotKey - why not trigger a reload with a key press? Well the answer’s in the help file…

Clearly is a browser add-on created by the team at Evernote. It allows you to reformat the content of a web page into a cleaner simpler one for easier reading (like Readability) and of course also integrates seamlessly into Evernote. This application fits my way of consuming and saving interesting articles almost (see later) perfectly and I thought I’d share with you a few features you may not be so familiar with.

Visualisation is a powerful tool for conveying information in a succinct and digestable manner. In business we see diagrams versus narrative text and bullet points on a daily basis, but have you ever stopped to really consider why this is and why data visualisation in particular is such a key part of modern business? Before we dive in I’d like you to take a few moments to consider a few questions.

SAP Org Visualization by Nakisa (SOVN) OrgChart allows you to visualise the hierarchical structure of an organisation based on HCM data held in SAP. It is the foundation of the SAP Org Visualization by Nakisa solution extension and can be installed for a variety of reasons.

When it comes to SAP Visualization Solutions by Nakisa (VSN), the log file is king. It is the source of information about all the transactions and activities carried out. In my first few weeks working with SAP VSN products I was quickly made aware of just how significant the CDS (Corporate Directory Services) log is and it is the foundation to solving at least a good 90% of issues encountered when configuring VSN applications.

A little under a year ago I joined the world of SAP. I’ve been working in IT for some time now in a wide variety of roles, but it is only relatively recently that I’ve entered into the mysterious and at times daunting world of SAP. Whilst I have experienced and helpful colleagues I can call upon for assistance they are not my only source of the latest SAP related information.

In my first blog post in this series on contributing to SCN I wrote about making the decision to contribute to the SAP Community Network (SCN). In this blog post I’m going to take a look at some of the ways in which you can contribute to SCN. From what might qualify as a contribution, through to the different ways and mediums that SCN can allow you to create and publish your contributions. Finally we’ll take a look at some ideas for the sorts of things you might like to consider for your next or even first contribution.

If you’ve been following my previous posts on whether you should contribute to SCN and how you can contribute to SCN I would hope that by now you have made some sort of commitment to yourself that you will be adding some great content in the very near future. However there’s something I haven’t discussed yet and that’s about how much to contribute.

Creating something new is one of the most rewarding things you can do and for the last few days I’ve been posting about why, what and how to do just that on the SAP Community Network (SCN). In this post I’m going to take a look at some examples of things we can all do to improve the content we see on SCN. Whilst it isn’t an exhaustive list by any means (that would be impossible) and whilst you may in fact do all of these things I hope there’s at least one thing in here that can help improve what we have.

I hope at least some of you have been following my posts of the last week about contributing to SCN. In this my final post in the series I thought I’d just wrap things up with a bit of a summary of what’s come before, some background to the series and something a little special that I hope all of you will take the opportunity to join in.

A little while back I was scanning through some questions on Quora when I spotted one relating to Evernote that I thought I could help with.  The question was “Is there a shortcut to copy the note URL in Evernote on Windows”….

I’m a big fan of AutoHotKey a great scriptable automation tool for Windows and I use it for a number of things. One of these is to quickly access favourite files and folders.