I don't talk about it much on the blog, but I get an enormous amount of support email. The quantity can be overwhelming at times, and without some automation, it would be nearly impossible for me to do it alone.

Which I do. Every support reply, in all the years we've been here, has been written by me. (Yes, even the Dog's auto response. Sorry, he can't really type. But wouldn't it be sweet if he could?)

No Downtime

The basic problem with being a small "indie" shop is quite simple: you get no time off. I've literally worked every single day since starting Shirt Pocket, without fail, to ensure users get the help they request in their time of need. It's just part of the deal.

But, every so often you need a break, and to try to enforce the "less work" idea there, I try to bring something other than a Mac...since that means I can't do development, but can respond to users as needed.

Automation: It's Not Just for Print Bureaus

Many of the support requests are sent through the "Send to Shirt Pocket" button in the log window, especially when people want help determining what part of their hardware is failing. That submission includes a ZIP file of the settings involved in the backup, which contains the log, some supplementary diagnostic information, and any SuperDuper! crash logs that might have occurred.

One of the first things I did to automate my workflow, beyond some generally useful boilerplate, was to use Noodlesoft's Hazel to detect when I download the support ZIP from our tracking system.

When Hazel sees that happen, it automatically unzips the package, navigates through its content, pulls the most recent log and diagnostic information, and presents them to me so I can review them.

It's a pretty useful combination of Hazel's automation and a basic shell script, and I've used this setup for years. It's saved countless hours of tedium...something all automation should do.

Seriously if you have a repetitive task, take the time to automate it—you'll be happy you did.

Two Years Ago

So, a couple of winters ago, in order to fulfill the "try not to work a lot on vacation" pledge, I took a cellular connected iPad Pro along as my "travel computer". While it was plenty fast enough to do what I needed to do, the process of dealing with these support events was convoluted, at best.

I had to use a combination of applications to achieve my goal, and when that become tiresome (so much dragging and tapping and clicking), I couldn't figure out how to automate it with Workflow.

Now, I'm not inexperienced with this stuff: I've been writing software since something like 1975. But no matter what I tried, Workflow just couldn't accomplish what I wanted to do. Which made the iPad Pro impractical as my travel computer: I just couldn't work efficiently on it.

(I know a lot of people can accomplish a lot on an iPad. But, this was just not possible.)

One Year Ago

So, the next year, I decided to purchase a Surface Go with LTE. It's not a fast computer, but it's small and capable, and cheap: much cheaper than the iPad Pro was.

And, by using the Windows Subsystem for Linux, in combination with PowerShell, I was able to easily automate the same thing I was doing with Hazel on macOS.

I was rather surprised how quickly it came together, with execution flow passing trivially from Windows-native to Unix-native and back to Windows-native.

This made traveling with the Surface Go quite nice! Not only does the Surface Go have a good keyboard, I had no significant issues during the two vacations I took with that setup, plus it was small and light.

This Year

But I'm not always out-and-about with a laptop, and sometimes support requests come in when I've just got a phone.

With iOS, I was back to the same issues that iPadOS had: there was no good way to automate the workflow. Even with iOS/iPadOS 13, it could not be done.

In fact, iOS 13 made things worse: even the rudimentary process I'd used up until iOS 12 was made even more convoluted, with multiple steps going from a Download from the web page into Files, and then into Documents, and then unzipping, and then drilling down, and then scrolling, opening, etc.

On a iPhone, it's even worse.

Greenish Grass

Frustrated by this, a few weeks ago I purchased a Pixel 4, to see how things had progressed on the Android front.

I hadn't used an Android phone since the Galaxy S9, and Google continues to move the platform forward.

As I said in a "epic" review thread

iOS and Android applications are kind of converging on a similar design and operational language. There are differences, but in general, it's pretty easy to switch back and forth, save for things that are intentionally hard (yes, Apple, you've built very tall walls around this lovely garden).

And while Android's security has, in general, improved, they haven't removed the ability to do some pretty cool things.

And one of those cool things was to actually bring up my automatic support workflow.

Mischief, Managed

Now, given you can get a small Linux terminal for Android, I probably could have done it the same way as with Windows, with a "monitoring" process that then called a shell script that did the other stuff just like before.

But, instead, I decided to try using Automate, a neat little semi-visual automation environment, to do it. And within about two hours, including the time needed to learn Automate, it was up and running.

Automate Unzip Logs Workflow

I'm not saying the result isn't nerdy, but it was doable! And that made it entirely practical to respond to people when I'm using a phone, even when they send in a more complex case.

Will that be enough to encourage me to stay on Android? I don't know. But, combined with the other iOS 13 annoyances (apps that get killed when they shouldn't, constant location prompts even after you've said "Allow Always", general instability...so many things), it's been a comparatively pleasant experience...Android has come a long way, even in the last two years.

It's really nice to have alternatives. Maybe I'll just travel with a phone this year!