UX

How To, UX

Have you wanted to add your signature to an email in Outlook without having to lift your hands from the keyboard? No? Well, I have and maybe one day you’ll want to stop selecting your signature from a menu because you’ve come back from PTO and now have approximately 200 emails to respond to. Setting up a keyboard shortcut for this task will save you a surprising amount of time. It just takes a few clicks and a little practice using the shortcut.

To create a keyboard shortcut for your Outlook signature you’ll need to customize the Quick Access Toolbar on the Main Screen. Once added, you can use the shortcut Alt+[nth icon]+Enter.

To add the Signature icon to the Quick Access Toolbar click through the following menu items or follow the steps below:

Quick Access Toolbar Dropdown > Popular Commands > All Commands > Signature > Add > OK

  1. Open the Quick Access Toolbar by clicking the dropdown menu icon in the top left of Outlook’s main screen. See below.
Screenshot: Quick Access Toolbar Menu dropdown

  1. Scroll down to More Commands… and left click. 
Screenshot: Quick Access Toolbar > More Commands...

  1. In the Outlook Options menu click on the Popular Commands Dropdown. 
Screenshot: Quick Access Toolbar > Popular Commands

  1. Click All Commands.
Screenshot: Quick Access Toolbar > Popular Commands > All Commands

  1. Click on Signature. 
Screenshot: Quick Access Toolbar > Popular Commands > All Commands > Signature

  1. Click on Add >>. You’ll see the Signature menu item appear in the Customize Quick Access Toolbar menu to the right.
  1. From here you can adjust the position of the Signature menu item using the up and down arrows on the right.
  1. Click OK when done adjusting the item’s position.
  1. To access the menu item use Alt+[nth icon]+Enter. For example, my icon is set to the fourth icon from the left, so my keyboard shortcut is Alt+4. See image below.
Screenshot: Signature Icon dropdown

  1. To insert your signature, at your cursor’s position, press Enter.  

* This will only add the Signature icon to the main Outlook screen. To access your signature using a keyboard shortcut from a New Message or a message that has been Popped Out of the main screen just repeat the same process above in a New Message window.

That’s it! It may take a few messages to get used to the shortcut, as it isn’t a single combination of keys, but it will decrease the time needed to add a signature to an email thread. If your work involves a lot of email chains, you’ll save a surprising amount of time setting this up.

Code, UX

I really enjoy playing this silly game called House Flipper. You can decorate, and now build, houses to your heart’s content, and if you edit the json file, money is no object. The r/houseflipper subreddit is really delightful. It’s a nice community with posts of decorated spaces and questions about how to unlock all the achievements. Recently a number of users have been posting their tips for coming up with new paint palettes or design schemes using random color or idea generators. There’s only one problem with using something like adobe color and that’s that they don’t have the in-game palette.

So I did what any completionist would do, I methodically painted a wall with stripes of color, four at a time, during in-game sunny daylight to get consistent lighting, and took screenshots. Then I used 3D Paint to lift the colors and put the corresponding color names and hex values into excel where I used some overly complicated concatenation to auto format the list into an array of arrays. After getting my array of arrays I used a random number generator to pick an array and plug in the values into the web page. Easy! The CSS only took a couple of hours – I needed to refresh my memory on creating a grid layout. And the only thing left to do was write the JavaScript.

2.5 days later and what I thought would take about 1-2 hours the project was complete. I code as a hobby and when you’re not using it daily it just slips right out of your head. Or, maybe that’s just me? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Anyway, I have it running in codepen, link below. (You’ll have to click through to see it in action as CodePen doesn’t seem to play well with WordPress but you can see a screenshot below).

Codepen: Randomize some Colors

UX

Photo of a backlit keyboard.
Shortcut T is not a suggestion. Photo from Unsplash by Nhu Nguyen

So I recently came across a library for Python called Arcade. And I’ve been following this tutorial at Real Python to build a platformer. So far it’s been both fun and also frustrating. There’s a pretty nifty app called Tiled Map Editor that lets you design levels. The steps for creating a map and using Tiled in the tutorial I’ve been following have been clear and straight forward. Except when it comes to adding assets to an object layer.

Object layers allow you to specify rules for assets on that layer. So, you can specify point values for things the player can pick up, or where they should start and end, for example. It took about two hours to figure out why I couldn’t place sprites onto an object layer but it worked just fine for other types of layers. You must press T on the keyboard. It’s buried in Tiled’s documentation, about halfway down this page, Working With Objects. You might notice that casually mentioned under Insert Tile it says, Shortcut T. The first time I skimmed the page I thought it was merely a suggestion to use a keyboard shortcut. It is not!

If you’re also having issues adding sprites to object layers, press T and see if you can now effortlessly add your assets to the layer. I know developers are busy people and this is the sort of thing that makes me want to write documentation. Had I written one of the several tutorials or YouTube videos I checked to figure out why I could not add anything to an objects layer I would have saved myself about two hours. There were many sighs of relief in addition to fist shaking once I tried pressing T.

Tldr; To add sprites to a new object layer in Tiled Map Editor, press T on the keyboard first. Happy level editing.

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