March 30, 2009 Comments Off
I’ve just published an update for Home Document Manager. This should knock off a couple of bugs and introduce two new features.
Better Deleted Items Management
It’s now easier to manage your deleted items. Clicking “Clear Deleted Items” will permanently remove any items in your “Deleted Documents” folder. Caution – this cannot be undone.
Recent Documents
Home Document Manager now keeps track of which documents you’ve accessed recently, allowing you easy access.
As usual, no action is required on your part. Home Document Manager will update itself when an Internet connection is present. Happy shredding!
March 22, 2009 Comments Off
There aren’t a great many things that can get me into the office at 7.30 on a Sunday morning. Unfortunately, this was one of them. A nasty little bug crept in to the last update that had to be put right ASAP. Some new users were unable to run the application, it was simply crashing on startup. This has been fixed. For existing users, this will be just another update.
For new users who have experienced this problem, you will need to uninstall the existing version and then download the new version from the web site. Sorry about that! I know it’s a pain, but unfortunately the application was crashing before it had a chance to run an update.
Right, now that’s sorted, I’m off home for some breakfast! If anyone encounters any problems, just email me – my Blackberry is with me at all times. Or send me a tweet.
- No sleep, no problem (wheelontheweb.wordpress.com)
March 19, 2009 Comments Off
I’ve just published a minor update. Well, minor from your perspective, over a week’s worth of blood and sweat for me. From your stand point, all that will have changed will be the activation process for new customers – I’ve added a little polish. The new instructions for activating the application can be found here.
As usual, no action required on your part, Home Document Manager will update itself when an Internet connection is available. Happy shredding.
March 15, 2009 Comments Off
Making email your servant rather than your master has become a crucial skill in the productivity stakes, especially in a web culture of being continually available to friends, followers, family, clients etc. by email, Twitter, Blackberry etc. Very occasionally, we need to be completely free of distractions in order to knuckle down, put the blinkers on and focus on a single task.
This always raises the question of what we do with our inbox? Do we ignore it? Let it accumulate a few dozen/hundred emails ready for our return? This often proves to be a distraction, a temptation to check.
Do we delete all emails on arrival? What if something urgent comes in?
GMail offers us a nice way out of the quandary. Depending on what you use a particular email address for, here’s one way of nicely going dark without missing important emails: (note, let’s assume our email address is bob@gmail.com)
Set an Out-of-Office reply. It’s important that the text in the reply is appropriate for your particular uses. There’s also an important aspect to the reply – the way to contact you with an urgent matter.
“Please note that due to an important commitment, I will be unavailable from Sunday 15th March to Tuesday 17th March inclusive. As such, your email message has not been delivered. To get in touch with me, please resend your email at any point from Wednesday 18th March onwards.
If your message is urgent, please resend it now to bob+urgent@gmail.com
Thank you in advance for your understanding.
Regards,
Bob”
Setting an out of office reply
A few of key points:
- We’re making it clear that we’ve gone dark because of an important commitment, not because we’re going on a 3 day drinking binge in Amsterdam.
- We’re giving specific dates that we will be out of contact for.
- We’re making it clear that the message has not been delivered and should be resent at a later date if it’s important.
- We’re offering a way for people to be pushy if something really is urgent. The fact that they are given this opportunity will dissuade folks from bugging you with every little thing, but people in real urgent need can contact you. The ‘+urgent’ part of the email address is a nifty feature, and will be delivered to you as normal.
Set up “tunnel vision” filter. Add a filter to your account so that any mail not addressed to bob+urgent@gmail.com is deleted.
Adding the filter
Delete it
This helps us stop the inbox count leaving zero unless there’s a a genuinely urgent message. All incoming emails will be deleted unless they’re sent to bob+urgent@gmail.com. When we’re back in contact, just remember to turn off the filter and Out-of-Office reply!
What do you do with your email when you’re trying to focus on a task? What could we do to improve this GMail hack?
March 9, 2009 Comments Off
Welcome to the Monday update!
It’s been a pretty full week, and today’s update is probably the most significant since Home Document Manager’s launch.
What’s new? Well…scanning’s new. As of today, you can scan directly into Home Document Manager using any TWAIN or WIA compatible scanner – if you don’t know what that means you can safely ignore this sentence. You can now scan in single 1-page documents in a flatbed or multiple 1-page documents and multi-page documents using the document feeder.
There are a couple of wrinkles in the scanning of multiple pages into a multi-page PDF file, but these seem to be driver specific and I’ll be working to iron these out over the next week.
Here’s what it looks like – To start with, there is new section in the main ribbon of the application for scanning related activities:
New menu items
The new commands are Select Scanner, Single Page Document Scan, and Multi-page Document Scan.
Select Scanner allows you to choose which of the image acquisition devices attached to your computer you wish to use. If you don’t choose a device, the default device for your system is used. On my system, it presents me with the following choices:
Select image acquisition source.
Single Page Document Scan is ideal if you want to scan only a subsection of a page using the flatbed, or have a collection of single page documents and want to import them quickly using the document feeder. When you click import, you’re asked to provide a useful name for your document, this doesn’t impact the built in search functionality, but it does make a document more instantly recognisable in the document list.
A useful name for your document
After you’ve entered a useful name, or accepted the default, you’re presented with the scanning dialog on which you can adjust various properties of the scan, ranging from DPI (dots per inch, or image quality) to color, even which part of an image is captured.
The Scanning Dialog
If you’re using the flatbed, clicking ‘Preview‘ allows you to preview the document and adjust which part is captured, if necessary. For example:
Select An Area To Scan
Here, we can see the selection rectangle has been reduced to minimise the amount of empty white space in the scanned document. Clicking “Adjust the quality of the scanned picture” presents the following dialog:
Scanning Properties
allowing you to alter brightness, contrast, color and image quality. Finding the optimal properties will be something of an art, depending on your scanner and the types of documents you’re importing.
The process for Multi-page Document Scan is the same. Using the document feeder, load in the pages for the multi-page document, they are each scanned in turn and compiled into a single multi-page PDF file. The document is then imported as usual.
Thanks to everyone for their feedback over the last week. With such a significant chunk of functionality going in today, your feedback will be crucial in ironing out any wrinkles. As usual, there is no action required on your part tu upgrade – Home Document Manager will quietly install the update when there is a connection to the Internet.
Happy shredding!
