Software History

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 give a little bit of background to the what, why and how.

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).

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 hand-held Apple devices. After it’s acquisition by Apple, the app evolved 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 additional projects; one of which is a new and ongoing collection of shortcuts.

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.

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.

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?

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 whistles 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.

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?

Working with shell scripting is in essence very similar to programming in a more traditional compile-to-run language. The key differences for me are the depth of access and that it is interpreted. On occasion the scripting commands available simply don’t do everything you might want in one simple to execute command, and so, just like any other areas of coding, you can go down the path of creating your own functions and shorthand. In this post I’m going to share a few functions I’m using for adding content to the Mac clipboard/pasteboard.

I’ve been a Google Chrome user for many years, but with my regular use of i*OS and spending more time using my Macbook Pro out and about, battery life management and sharing of bookmarked sites across device has become more important for my everyday use. As a result, I’ve been using Safari as my default Mac web browser. But there are a few tab management features that I was missing from Chrome, so a while back I set about adding those in using some of the tools I had at my disposal.

While SAP SuccessFactors has now moved from quarterly to bi-annual releases, SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) remains on a quarterly release schedule. This means that Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC) continues to get quarterly updates on the C4C-side of the solution, with updates to other solution components following the SuccessFactors release timelines. In this article, I’ll briefly cover some of the features that have reached general availability before examining many of the enhancements relevant to employee service use. Particularly surprising is the number of enhancements in this release are related to e-mails in and out of the system.

Last year I finally made my big web site move from Squarespace to Github Pages. In that post I went into some of the background of the move, and while the vast majority of things have improved in terms of my requirements, one thing has been much worse. For the site I use a static web site generator known as Jekyll. It works by converting various configuration templates and content files into a web site. Locally, on my Macbook Pro, I tend to use an incremental generation during my testing and within a few seconds it churns out the new site. With a full site generation it actually takes closer to a minute. This site is many hundreds of cross referenced pages, so it takes a while. When I upload the content to Github Pages, which also utilises Jekyll, it takes even longer. Minutes in fact. This is where it falls down in comparison to Squarespace. I don’t get a near instant publish. This means that I could inadvertently post links too soon, or I have to check back to see if it has published yet. Sometimes, there can even be failures (very few and far between fortunately). This has been an annoyance for a few months now, and so I recently took a look at creating something to help me with this.

My Elgato Stream Deck is a great little piece of hardware that I can have dynamically offer up differing controls depending upon the application I’m working with, and the type of work I’m doing. For my MacBook Pro use, it is generally on my home office desk as an alternative to the Touch Bar which is less easy to view, and I also use it almost daily with my work PC. But, there are occasions, COVID-19 restrictions aside, when it is useful to take my Stream Deck with me. It certainly elevates my PC usage and makes jumping around non-linear PowerPoint presentations much easier. For the MacBook Pro, my Touch Bar is usually sufficient, but sometimes I want the Stream Deck with me so that I can create things for and utilise it directly. But simply slinging my Stream Deck into my backpack for my travels would not give it much life before it inevitably broke, and for that reason I decided to purchase some Stream Deck armour.

The first SuccessFactors release of 2020 is just around the corner, and with it will come the release of the new SuccessFactors Learning administrator user interface. In case you have not yet thought about your preparations for the transition to the new interface, I would like to draw your attention to the SAP transition guide and FAQ, and provide the following suggestions which I hope that you will find useful in planning your activities.

Drafts is utilitarian text app available on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS that I use frequently. To say I’m a daily user would not do justice to the app. As the tag line says this is the app where text starts, and that’s certainly true of my use cases. It provides a quick point of capture and powerful tools to let me do more with the text to prepare and send it to its final destination than any other app possible could; and that says a lot when you look at apps like Keyboard Maestro, Text Soap and Sublime Text! In the latest release (version 19) of the app on macOS, developer Greg Pierce (aka AgileTortoise) has significantly extended the automation and processing scope through the addition of AppleScript, and in this post I’m going to walk you through some example set-ups related to this.

Back in 2017, Spotify made a rather curious change to their web player app. They made some changes to stop it working in the Safari browser. The native Mac app was still there, but if you wanted to web it up, you needed another web browser. Now I used to be Chrome all the way on both Mac and PC, but since I got a new MacBook Pro last year which actually had what seems to be a reasonable battery life (compared to its nine-ten year old predecessor), I figured a switch to a power optimised native browser was worth considering. But this presented me with a bit of a challenge for a particular use case I have.

It is time for the patient users of SuccessFactors Learning to be rewarded. After what seems like an aeon, the release of a new administrator user interface into production use is in sight, and organisations with access to preview systems can get their hands on a fresh new version of SuccessFactors Learning right now. And it is not just a new lick of paint. This really is a ground-up rebuild of a large chunk of functionality, and that brings many additional benefits rather than just cosmetic changes. This update is long-awaited, and it is critical. The legacy of the Plateau system from which SuccessFactors Learning comes is such, that to deliver a flexible interface, it was developed in a web technology created by Adobe. A technology known as Flash. Flash has been famously plagued with issues around security and performance, to the point where even Adobe has thrown in the towel. The bell sounds on Flash at the end of this year with all major browsers pulling mainstream support. Therefore, a full replacement administrator interface must be in place for SuccessFactors Learning before then.

SAP has been pushing hard over the last couple of years to up their game regarding mobile support. The ever more mobile global workforce’s need to be able to operate effectively via SuccessFactors has been increasing, and while the COVID-19 situation that has seen many geographic regions subjected to restricted mobility, the use for mobile has not subsided. Mobile continues to be a key operational channel. 2019 saw a general parity in features achieved across the mobile platforms. Judging by the monthly mobile app releases for 2020 thus far, it seems that SAP has shifted to bringing more of the web application features to their mobile applications.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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 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.

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.

When I’m creating Drafts actions and testing them out, I quite often need test data to work with. Rather than creating test data each time, I figured I should sort out some standard test data. While I could certainly have used a tool like TextExpander, which Drafts notably supports natively on i*OS, I decided instead to roll it into some actions, and in this post I’m going to explain a little bit about that and how you can make use of them too.

I’ve recently been working on a new project (more on that soon I hope), where I have been titling content. My use of consistent styling for titling of various blog posts and the like has probably been less than consistent, so I figure that this was a good opportunity to have a got at turning that around. The Chicago Manual of Style choice of titling rules seemed pretty good and so I’ve gone with that, but consistency is key and ease of use is required, so here’s a little Mac automation using Keyboard Maestro that sorts it all out for me.

SuccessFactors may be on bi-annual releases, but SAP Cloud for Customer (C4C) continues apace on its quarterly-release cycle. Since Employee Central Service Centre (ECSC), the SuccessFactors solution for running an HR service desk uses this system as its service back-end system. It means that ECSC users continue to receive updates every quarter. In this release, SAP is releasing several home page-related updates, which may be an indicator of things to come given how under-utilised this area of C4C has been in the past. Along with this, there are ticket processing updates, some features to please the administrators, and of course, some additions around reporting and analytics.

XYplorer is one of my favourite Windows apps and it has been a little while since I’ve shared anything about how I’m using it. So, when I added a new script this week that uses 7-Zip I thought I’d draft a quick post about it along with a related script also using 7-Zip.

I’ve been a long time Evernote user and while the application and services have certainly seen a lot of issues arising in the last decade, I still rely on it for some of my workflows. One of these is my daily journal, and this is a topic I have written about several times before. I recently had a bit of a change to this, and it is time for another quick write-up.