Journal: 31 Mar 2019

It was Mothers Day today, so obviously I spent my afternoon at the parents house. Me and my girlfriend went to see hers afterwards, so it wasn’t one-sided.

After spending time with out families, it was just about time for dinner. After which, I popped out for coffee with a few friends, and I’m now sat in front of Netflix.

I can’t say I had an extravagant day, but it was good to get out of the house and see our families!

Journal: 30 Mar 2019

After going to bed surprisingly early last night, I still had a pretty long lie in this morning. I woke up at about 11 am!

After me and my girlfriend had our morning tea/coffee, and watched a bit of television, we headed into town for lunch at our regular cafe. Of course they simply asked if we wanted the usual. We go there quite a lot.

While we were there I got a few bits for mother’s day tomorrow, and some other usual bits we needed for the house.

After we got back, there wasn’t much time to anything else, as I went out with my friends for a meal in London. We went to a vegan pizza restaurant called Purezza, it was very good! I’m not a vegan, so I think I can provide a bit of an alternate perspective sometimes. And this certainly tasted much better than a lot of non-vegan pizzas I’ve had before.

Now I’ve got home, I think it’s time to watch a movie (probably Avengers: Infinity War), and go to bed.

Text Case Guides

Just over one week ago, I released the first major update to Text Case. Since then, I’ve written and published four guides on different parts of the app. While they don’t combine to create a Text Case “User Manual”, I think they explain the most fundamental parts, and hopefully some features that users will be surprised by.

What Is Title Case?

In the first guide, I explained what Title Case is, and where it’s used. Title Case is the major format in Text Case, as that’s the most popular one for writers, because it’s more complicated than you’d think.

In Text Case, I support four different standards of Title Case, so this guide explains the standards, and also how to customise them in the app.

Read the guide.

Customising Text Case

Quite self-explanatory, but as there are quite a lot of things you can customise inside Text Case, I thought it would be useful to have these explained all in one place.

Read the guide.

Using the Action Extension in Text Case To Format Text

As I mentioned before, Text Case has an Action Extension, so you can use Text Case to format any text selection in iOS. This guide explains how to enable the extension, and also how to use it.

Read the guide.

Using Siri with Text Case

You can use Text Case with Siri Shortcuts, and also as an action inside the Shortcuts app. This guide explains every thing Siri-related.

Read the guide.


If you haven’t already got a copy of Text Case, you can find it on the App Store.

Journal: 29 Mar 2019

It’s not long after 10pm here, but this week has really tired me out to the point t that I’m now completely shattered. So I’m going for a super early night (usually I’m up well past 12).

That means, this won’t be a very long journey al entry. Thankfully, I don’t actually get up to much.

I went to work as usual, came back home, cooked a pasta bake for dinner, did some cleaning round the house, and the man I played about ten minutes of World of Warcraft. In the mean time I watch loads more Lost!

That’s all you’re getting from me today. Come back tomorrow for more of the regular scheduled journal content.

I’m going to bed.

Journal: 28 Mar 2019

Today was a tiny bit more exciting than yesterday.

I posted another guide for Text Case on my blog today, this time about using Siri Shortcuts and the Shortcuts app. I originally planned to have one more, just so I could make it a full week. But I never actually worked out what the fifth guide would be about, as I think the four current guides explain the app quite well. I would place about a 5% chance of there being another guide, so I hope they’re useful to people!

The main thing that made today more interesting, was Captain Marvel. I literally just walked in the house, after seeing it with my sister. It was a really great film, I rank it very highly with some of the best Marvel films. It’s made even more eager to watch Avengers: Endgame when it comes out! I would totally recommend anyone to go and see Captain Marvel, whether you’re familiar with the Marvel universe or not.

Using Siri with Text Case

This is a guide related to my app, Text Case. It’s a utility app that lets you transform text into various different formats. You can find all the guides in one place, and Text Case on the App Store.


Everyone loves Siri. Well they don’t always, but sometimes it can be pretty useful. Fortunately, Text Case supports Siri so that you can convert text into any format using it!

Unfortunately, there’s no way for apps to take any form of input from Siri, so Text Case uses your clipboard as a form of input and output.

Siri Shortcuts

The simplest way to open up Text Case to Siri, is to record a custom phrase for a specific format.

To do this, you’ll need to navigate to the Setting screen, and tap on “Add to Siri”. That will bring up a list of every format in Text Case, and after tapping on one of these, the Siri Shortcut interface will appear, where you can record a phrase to use with this format.

One a Siri Shortcut is set up, to format your text, all you need to do is to copy some text, say the phrase to Siri, and the formatted result will be ready to paste wherever you want.

The Shortcuts App

That’s not all you can do with Text Case though, as you can even use these actions within the Shortcuts app.

However, as Text Case deals with the clipboard, you will need to make sure you set the clipboard to the text you want to be formatted, and then retrieve the clipboard when you want to use the results.

Here is a basic example of how you can make use of Text Case inside a Shortcut:


You can download Text Case on the App Store.

 

Journal: 27 Mar 2019

Another one of them days again!

An average day at work, followed by a slightly more interesting evening!

Perhaps the only productive thing I did today was to post another Text Case guide. Today’s one was about the Action Extension, how to set it up, and how to use it.

Hopefully I’ll have more interesting journal entries again soon, but until then, I’ve still got to continue writing them! I’ve not missed a single day this year.

Using the Action Extension in Text Case To Format Text

This is a guide related to my app, Text Case. It’s a utility app that lets you transform text into various different formats. You can find all the guides in one place, and Text Case on the App Store.


Although the main Text Case app can be a very useful app to have open while you’re formatting a few pieces of text, sometimes you just want a little less friction while you’re writing.

That’s why you can format any text in iOS, simply by selecting text, sharing it to Text Case, and then just tapping once on the format you want to use. It’s a flow I use whenever I’m writing on my iPhone or my iPad, because it allows you to completely focus on your writing, without needing to manually switch apps to just format a title.

Enabling the Extension

First off, you’ll need to enable the Action Extension. This can be quite long-winded, so it’s best to follow along with the screenshots below, or there are some written steps.

  1. Select any text in your favourite text editor.
  2. Tap Share.
  3. When the share sheet appears, on the bottom row you’ll find an option called “More” with three dots as the icon. Tap that.
  4. It should then open a list where you can enable and disable any available actions from your installed apps. You need to enable Text Case’s “Convert Text” action.
  5. After that, tap done, and it will appear in the list of actions in the bottom row of the share sheet.

Formatting Text via the Extension

Once you’ve got it enabled, formatting text is rather simple.

  1. Select the text you want to format.
  2. Tap Share.
  3. Select “Convert Text” from the bottom row of the share sheet.
  4. When Text Case appears, you just need to tap once on the format you want to use. By default Title Case will be the first option.
  5. After you tapped on the formatted title in Text Case, you will be returned to your previous app, where your text should still be selected.
  6. You can now tap on Paste to overwrite the text with the formatted version.

You can download Text Case on the App Store.

Journal: 26 Mar 2019

It’s time for another one of my simple journal entries.

The first half of the day was spent at work, what a surprise! It was a pretty good day.

After work, my girlfriend made pizza for dinner, and we watched “Bad Moms”, which I thought was a very funny film!

I did get around to publishing another Text Case guide on my blog, which was about customising Text Case. Just a little spoiler, you can customise quite a lot!

Customising Text Case

This is a guide related to my app, Text Case. It’s a utility app that lets you transform text into various different formats. You can find all the guides in one place, and Text Case on the App Store.


There’s quite a lot of things that you can change in Text Case, so you can feel more at home while formatting all of your lovely text.

Theme

First off is the theme. There are currently two themes in Text Case, the obvious Light and Dark options. More will come in the future, but alas, that’s not relevant to this guide.

The theme is applied globally, and therefore it affects the app and the share extension. The theme changes the background colour, the input field colours, and the colour the formatted results that appear in the app.

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To change the theme, you just need to navigate to the Settings screen, tap on the Theme option at the top, and then select a theme from the list.

App Icon

You can also change how Text Case appears from your home screen, with 22 different icons to choose from.

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To change the app icon, you navigate to the Settings screen, tap on App Icon, and select one from the list. An alert will appear to confirm the change.

Title Case Style

As mentioned in a previous guide, “What Is Title Case?“, you can change the style of Title Case that is used within the app. So if you want to know more about Title Case, and how to change it, check out the article.

Formats Section Order

There will always be formats that you use more than others, so that’s why there’s an option to rearrange the format sections in the app.

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This can be managed from the Settings screen, under “Change Section Order”. Once there, you can drag the sections to indicate the order you want them displayed in.

Below each section title, you can see the current number of formats that are visible for each one. Just a quick note, if a section has no visible formats, it won’t appear in the formats list when transforming text.

If you do make changes to the order, you can always go back to the default option, by tapping on the Reset button in the top-right corner.

Enable/Disable Formats

Along with rearranging the sections in Text Case, you can hide a format completely, so it won’t appear in the app or share extension.

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It’s very simple to do, just choose the “Enable/Disable Formats” from the Settings screen, and then tap to enable or disable formats as you wish!


You can download Text Case on the App Store.