Continued from ActiveWords Part 3
ActiveWords watches your actions and prompts you to create an active word for repetitive tasks. It means your productivity increases as your wordbase grows. Using ActiveWords soon becomes so effortless that you really miss not having it available. It’s a good thing that the ActiveWords Pro licence allows you to run it on three other computers you use (e.g. work, home, laptop).
It’s easy to move the database between machines. My ActiveWords database travels between home & work on my USB Drive (it’s about 6 Mb). You transfer by making a copy on the primary machine. This copy gets merged with the database on the second machine. The transfer back is a repeat of the copy/merge process. Item “Merge” rather than “file replace” means you can never loose an ActiveWord during the transfer.
Anything that bugs me?
Nothing major. I’ve had no application errors from ActiveWords itself or in other applications because of it. Impressive when you consider it’s operating all the time and interacting with every application I use. I have found a few things to note but these are minor compared to the benefits (more about them later)
- Slows Windows start up a little: Not much but it’s yet another application to get running as Windows starts up. Of course it speeds up your PC use once running!
- AutoCAD Oddity: I find the AutoCAD command line sometimes “cloaks” the first character.
- e.g. With the cursor on the command line type “actwd” (my ActiveWord for ActiveWords!) and sometimes only “ctwd” will be detected by ActiveWords.
- The solution is to click away from the command window, say in the drawing editor, then it’s fine.I suspect this is something to do with AutoCAD’s rather unique command line/command entry system as haven’t seen it in another application.
- Other inputs in AutoCAD via the properties palette, editor or dialogs are perfectly OK.
- Database Merge can cause duplicates: ActiveWords ability to handle multiple entries for one trigger word creates an occasional need to delete edited entries after a database merge. An existing entry edited in the second location (maybe to correct a typo) will be imported as a unique new entry during the next merge. This is because the edited item is seen as a new entry.
- Occasional Action Lag: Occasionally an ActiveWords initiated action (launch or navigate rather than substitute) will be slow. I have only had this a few times and can’t pin down the cause. The action does happen after a short delay but it’s not as rapid as usual which is quicker than mouse navigating to achieve the same result.
UPDATE 14–08–05 ~ ACTION DELAY ELIMINATED AFER SOME HOUSEKEEPING
From ActiveWords Support:
The periodic delays you mention may relate to the "Learn & Train Agent" (Autosensing). Performance may improve if you delete all items in your "C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Recent" folder (it may also be called, "My Recent Documents"). The L&T agent (autosensing) scans this folder to determine what actions to take. Typically, this folder accumulates hundreds of old files and scanning can slow down performance. Items contained in the "Recent" folder are all Shortcuts, not the actual files, so deleting them is safe.
Regards, ActiveWords Support.
These are trivial compared to the real productivity gain and sheer satisfaction watching ActiveWords in action. It’s a great application and after a bit of use you can see how hard it’s working for you.
