My Photo

Tag Metasearch

Find this keyword:
In this category:

March 20, 2008

The E-Mails that make my day, and fan the Mac owners ire...

Yesterday we got an E-Mail from one of our great customers, e.g. Dorlene Kaplan. It is the kind of E-Mail that makes my day!

“After a frustrating six weeks I gave the iMac to my husband and bought a new ThinkPad. I'm thrilled to have ActiveWords back. Without it I'm in slow motion.

Thank you again for your terrific product.

Dorlene”

Thank you Dorlene..we need a million more customers like you!

We would love to build a Mac version of ActiveWords someday, and while it is on the list of things we would like to do, there are a lot of other things ahead of it, including our big idea


 

February 19, 2008

ActiveWords Scripting in Outlook...

 I live in Outlook, and every day I find myself thinking about how to script more things in Outlook. I have been using Outlook 2008 since before it “shipped” and couldn’t imagine using a computer without it. But there are things inside Outlook that are baffling. A simple example is the idea of forwarding a vCard in an E-Mail. It is a bit like one of those conversations where you know it is there somewhere, but you just don’t know where.

If you hold down the “alt” key inside the contact window, certain keyboard equivalents are revealed, but not enough. Hence today I scripted the ability to forward a vCard using ActiveWords and it was pretty simple, e.g.

<ALT>H</ALT>NI

Which is ActiveWords speak for:

<ALT> lowers the alt key

H…=hit the “h” key

</ALT> lets up on the alt key

N … = send

I…= Use Internet format, e.g. a vCard.

So, the next time someone says, oh, you have say Buzz’s contact info, you find it, and type say “fv” and whammo the vCard is in a new E-Mail ready to address and send on.

Works way too well, and the same logic applies for pretty much everything else in Outlook.

p.s. I am also looking for what I am told is the “MOSS”, e.g. the mother of all spreadsheets with every keyboard equivalent in Office, Vista and Outlook. If you know where I can find it, or who to reach out to, don’t hesitate but to ping me!

Tags:

January 30, 2008

ActiveWords Scripting, or investing 5 minutes to save lots of minutes..

I just wrote a dynamite script using ActiveWords, as I so often find myself sending “urls” off to people.

<ALT>d</ALT><CTRL>c</CTRL><nem><TAB:5>

<CTRL>v</CTRL><SHIFT><TAB:4>

So, assuming you are at a webpage, this script does the following:

<ALT>d</ALT> goes to the address line

<CTRL>c</CTRL> copies whatever is in the address line

<nem> is an ActiveWord that uses our Outlook agent to create a “new E-Mail message”, http://www.activewords.com/plusapplications.html 

<New Outlook Email><icon:o|a>

which is inclduded in our Outlook agent e.g.

<TAB:5> tabs down 5 lines into the body of the email

<CTRL>v</CTRL> pastes the whatever is in the address line into the body of the E-Mail

<SHIFT><TAB:4> takes me back to the “to” line in Outlook so that I can address the E-Mail.

Copy and paste it into the “action” field in the scripting part of ActiveWords add wizard.

I call it “neml”

Seems to work great for me. I have used it a dozen times in the last day.

Try it and tell me what you think.

October 05, 2007

Time flies & GTD....

A friend just pointed out that it had been a month since I wrote something on my blog! Alas! So incredibly busy, and so many things going on. At times I feel like my life is moving at a glacerial pace, and others when it is moving like lightning.

We, i.e. ActiveWords, are testing a very cool WordBase for GTD. So if you read this and have ActiveWords & Outlook 2007, let me know and I will shoot you a copy of the WordBase to test. We have had great success with people who use David Allen’s methodology.

What else to say, summer is over here in the Northwest. Cold, gray, wet, with sunshine being a memory.

I have been playing around with my new iPhone. Very interesting device! Clearly V1, and clearly the impetus for a long of new development in the phone space. Makes me think that one of these days we will find a way to build ActiveWords for mobile devices.

Coming up is Pop!Tech, my absolute favorite event of the year. I have talked a bunch of my pals into going, so should be an a world class event again this year.

So watch this space, more to come!

November 07, 2005

Your wish is our command....searching a great books site in context!

I keep coming up with these ideas…and the guys on our team implement them better than I could have dreamed.

My friend Glenn Fleishman has this very cool site that I use all the the time, called ISBN.NU .

I use it to buy slightly used books all the time. I posed the question as to whether we could script a search on this site, and whammo, I got a  WordBase that is killer.

File Attachment: ISBN.awb (164 KB) Click on, it will self insert and trigger with the word “isbn”.

Searching in Context

One of the best ideas about ActiveWords is the ability to use our scripting language to do simple, albeit powerful searches in context.

One of the guys on our team just sent me a script for that allows you to search for books at Amazon. The script looks like this:

<"http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url?index=blended&field-keywords=<INPUTBOX:Amazon Generic Search>">

Simple copy and paste it into the action box of the scripting tool in the ActiveWords Add Wizard and name it. I call mine “books” and when I trigger it, an input box appears, I type in the name of the book/author and about 4 seconds later, i.e. using WiFi, I have a page of results.

I keep telling people that ActiveWords allows you to go from impulse to result, faster than any other way of navigating on your computer.

I have gotten in the habit of keeping a list of books in the tasks in Outlook, and this helps me find them when the “buy a book bug” hits me.

November 06, 2005

ActiveWords at Demo Fall...video on demand..

One of my friends just pointed me to the DemoFall web site. My presentation of ActiveWords for the Tablet PC is up. As everyone in the room knew, the network died during my presentation which was a huge headache. I was stunned and had to quickly change my presentation on the fly.

I watched it again a minute ago, and was grateful that I didn’t seem to miss the pacing that I had worked on.

The dilemma of doing a live demo is that you are always subject to the vagaries of the technology that plays an integral part of the presentation.

Everyone that I show ActiveWords on the Tablet to seems to be dazzled. Now if we can find someone to help us put it on a smart phone.