Back in the '90s I consulted at HBO, and they were migrating from MS Mail on Mac servers to MS Exchange on PCs. Problem was that MS Mail on the Mac had no address book export function, and execs often have thousands or even tens of thousands of contacts. The default solution was for personal assistants to copy out the contacts one by one.
So I experimented with screen hotkey tools. I knew about QuicKeys, but its logic and flow control at the time was somewhat limited. Enter <some program I can't remember the name of> which had a full programming language.
I wrote and debugged a tool that:
1. Listened to its own email box: cole.exporter@hbo.com
2. You emailed it your password (security? what security?)
3. Seeing such an email, it logged out of its own email and logged in to yours.
4. Then it opened your address book and copied out entries one by one.
5. It couldn't tell by any other method that it had reached the end of your address book, so if it saw the same contact several times in a row it would stop.
6. Then it formatted your address book into a CSV for importing to Exchange, and emailed it back to you.
7. It logged out of your account, and back into its own, and resumed waiting for an incoming email.
This had to work for several thousand employees over
a few weeks. I had 4 headless pizza box Macs in my office running this code. Several things could go wrong, since all the code was just assuming that the UI would be the same every time. So while in the "waiting" state I had the Macs "beep" once per minute, and each had a custom beep sound, which was just me saying "one" "two" "three" and "four". So my office had my voice going off an average of once every fifteen seconds for several weeks.
I did a similar thing in the Win9x days. I had some sound alert going off once in a while and I couldn't figure out what was causing it, worse, I didn't even recognize the sound. (It wasn't the standard "ding" or "chord".)
And when I went into the Windows sound scheme configurator, it had wacky names for some events like "asterisk" and "critical stop", with no explanation of what might trigger them.
So as a first step of narrowing it down, I made self-explanatory sounds for everything: I just recorded my voice saying "open program", "program error", "restore down", "exclamation", and so on, through the whole list, and assigned each sound to its respective event. There were a lot of them!
(Mind you, it was all the rage at the time to have whole collections of funny sounds assigned to all this stuff, movie lines and SFX and what-not, so there were these subtle games of one-upmanship to have a cooler sound scheme than anyone else.)
Not me. I had created the world's most humorless sound scheme. The only possible improvement would've been Ben Stein voicing the whole thing.
But in doing so, after a while, it took on this air of absolute hilarity. Like here's this machine that's capable of anything, it could make a star-trek-transporter sound, but there's just some guy's voice saying "empty recycle bin" with a flat, bored affect.
Nope. And every time I asked "is there some sort of program that just logs every time another program makes a sound?", I was told it was deeper system-level magic than anyone sane would ever attempt.
Par for the course Exchange/Outlook workarounds. My one and only awful experience working with Exchange recently would make me not surprised if this is still the best way to do this. Exchange feels like a flakey pre-alpha version of MongoDB - putting the "eventually" in "eventually consistent" with a real love affair with "sorry, just one at a time" UX.
I’ve occasionally used “auto-resuming breakpoints with sounds” in Xcode / iOS development, and it can be remarkably useful in some situations. But I had to be shown the possibility in a UI, really clever!
So I experimented with screen hotkey tools. I knew about QuicKeys, but its logic and flow control at the time was somewhat limited. Enter <some program I can't remember the name of> which had a full programming language.
I wrote and debugged a tool that:
This had to work for several thousand employees over a few weeks. I had 4 headless pizza box Macs in my office running this code. Several things could go wrong, since all the code was just assuming that the UI would be the same every time. So while in the "waiting" state I had the Macs "beep" once per minute, and each had a custom beep sound, which was just me saying "one" "two" "three" and "four". So my office had my voice going off an average of once every fifteen seconds for several weeks.