Phil Wylie

WordPress developer, Code Club volunteer & Staffs Web Meetup organiser

Simple Things Can Be Hard To Explain

Screenshot of Folge application showing a step-by-step workflow documentation interface.

This post is part of a little series where I share apps and services that help me work more efficiently. Good tools fade into the background and let you focus on what matters. You often don’t realise how much you rely on them—until they’re gone.

A key part of my role is clearly communicating processes and explaining how things work. What seems simple in your own mind can often be surprisingly difficult to explain to someone else. That’s why there’s nothing more effective—or reassuring—than walking someone through it step-by-step, avoiding doubt and miscommunication along the way.

Scheduling a call can sometimes seem like overkill. It’s both time-consuming and relies on memory. A written document can be referred back to, but creating formal documentation can also be surprisingly time-consuming—especially if you want it to look polished.

Clarify

I stumbled across Clarify many years ago, courtesy of a MacHeist bundle. It was one of those happy accidents—I’d bought the bundle for something else entirely, but ended up falling in love with this simple, focused tool that solved a problem I didn’t even know I had.

Creating documentation that combines screenshots, annotations, and clear instructions typically requires juggling multiple tools. Clarify was a wonderfully straightforward solution—it captured a series of screenshots, which could then be captioned and annotated, before being exported as a PDF guide using a consistent, branded template.

If you were already writing step-by-step instructions in an email and attaching a few screenshots, creating a complete guide with Clarify took no more effort—but the result was both easier to follow and far more refined.

Clarify was eventually discontinued, but I continued using it for many years—until a macOS update suddenly broke it. I’d lost a tool I’d come to depend on. It sounds odd to feel a sense of loss over software, but I had to come to terms with the fact that Clarify wasn’t coming back!

Folge

In my search for a replacement, I found that many solutions were geared towards enterprise—ideal for building large-scale knowledge bases, but overly complex for my needs and priced accordingly.

Folge caught my attention with its intuitive workflow that closely matched what I loved about Clarify. It’s purpose-built for creating step-by-step documentation—letting you capture, annotate, and export in one streamlined process.

When capturing a workflow, you can automatically record steps by clicking the mouse or for more control, pressing a key in combination with clicking. A delayed capture option makes it possible to document selections that would otherwise disappear on click.

The editor lets you quickly add captions, crop images, and annotate them. You can circle elements, draw arrows, place numbered markers to clarify multi-step actions, overlay text boxes, highlight areas, and blur sensitive information—all helping to create clear, focused documentation.

Screenshot of Folge's PDF export settings dialog box. The interface shows template options with 'Kanuka' selected, along with document configuration settings including step content flow, page layout set to A4 Portrait, toggles for cover page and step numeration (both enabled), step description position set to 'Before image', and filename format set to 'Original guide title'. At the bottom are 'Preview PDF' and 'Export PDF Document' buttons.

Folge’s templating system is excellent. You can include a cover page with your logo and document title, then define the fonts and colours used throughout the guide. The result is a consistent, professional-looking PDF—perfect for attaching to client emails or sharing internally.

Screenshot of the exported PDF document viewed in a PDF reader. The document shows a professional cover page with the Kanuka template design. The sidebar shows 4 pages total, with page 1 displaying the cover and subsequent pages containing the step-by-step workflow documentation with screenshots and instructions for filtering products by category in WordPress.

Conclusion

Developed by Oleksii Sribnyi and available for both Mac and Windows at folge.me. There’s a limited free version that’s perfect for trying it out, and the full version is reasonably priced with a one-time payment.

Folge removes the friction from documenting workflows, producing clean, professional, and consistent documents you’re proud to share with clients. For me, it picks up where Clarify left off—bringing back the simplicity I missed, with a few welcome improvements along the way.

ScreenMemory

Screenshot of ScreenMemory application showing a timeline view of a user's desktop activity on August 25, 2024. The interface displays a Chat by Copy.ai window and various application icons in the timeline below.

This post continues a series where I shout out apps and services that improve my workflow. These tools often fly under the radar but deserve recognition. Today’s spotlight: a clever solution to the challenge of accurate time tracking.

As a software developer, accurate time tracking can be a challenge. While the ideal solution would be to diligently log my time as I go (a habit I’m still working on!), the reality often falls short of this ideal.

A while back, my friend Dave recommended a utility called InstantShot!. You can set the program to take screenshots at regular intervals. This way, you’ll have a visual record of your day that you can use to piece together timesheets later on. For years, this app was my go-to solution, documenting my day without fuss or fanfare.

While effective, InstantShot! has aged, prompting my search for an alternative—a search that ultimately brought me to ScreenMemory. ScreenMemory is a more elegant approach and offers several advantages over its predecessor.

Unlike InstantShot!, which simply saves screenshots to a directory, ScreenMemory is purpose-built. Its rolling storage allows me to save the past few months of history, and it provides an interface for browsing screenshots. This interface is laid out like a media player; you can browse by date and scrub through the day with a timeline.

Settings window for ScreenMemory's "Timing" options. The interface shows settings to take screenshots every 60 seconds and set the end of day at 01:00.
Storage settings window for ScreenMemory. It shows options to clean data automatically, delete files older than 60 days, and displays current space used as 6.57 GB.

I can see exactly what I was working on at any given moment, which allows me to fairly allocate client time and ensures that no billable hour goes unaccounted for.

Far more than just a time-tracking tool, its use extends to various valuable functions: recalling past events, retrieving meeting details, revisiting webpages, and even backing up text. This versatility makes it an indispensable aid for memory and productivity.

ScreenMemory is available for $27, but you can take it for a test drive with a limited free trial. It’s written by Jonathan Winger Lang and you can learn more at his website.

Introducing Pure Paste

I’ve decided to start a little series about some of the apps, utilities and services I use. Some of the things that make life easier, but are often overlooked. I’ll keep these short—just enough to give an idea of what each tool does and why I like it. Maybe you’ll find something new to try out, or perhaps you’ll have some suggestions of your own.

First up is a little utility called Pure Paste. It’s a simple menu bar utility for Mac that does one thing: it strips formatting when you copy and paste.

My friend Andy recommended this to me, and I’ve got to say: it’s one of those tools that makes you wonder how you ever lived without it.

It saves the frustration of pasting something and then having to clean up the formatting. It’s just much easier for the default to be no formatting, but maybe that’s just me.

I know there’s a “Paste and Match Style” command, but it seems to change between apps. I can never remember the shortcut, and if I tried, I’d probably forget something more important! Pure Paste just sits there and does its thing…

When you do want to keep formatting, you can toggle it on and off. The icon reflects its current status.

It’s one of those tools that doesn’t try to do a million things. It does one job, and it does it well. If you’re tired of fighting with formatted text every time you paste something, give it a shot.

Pure Paste is free, available from the Mac App Store. It’s written by Sindre Sorhus and you can learn more at his website.

Streamlining Test User Management with WP-CLI

In my recent blog post for Kanuka Digital, I share insights from a project where we implemented a custom LearnDash user registration flow and an automated process for removing unverified, inactive accounts. By using WP-CLI to generate test users with specific registration dates and user meta values, we were able to thoroughly test the account deletion process before deploying it on the live site. This post highlights the importance of automation in WordPress development and how it can streamline complex, multi-step actions.

Streamlining Test User Management with WP-CLI

WordPress Bulk Post Creation with WP-CLI: A Handy Command Generator

Occasionally I find myself needing to quickly create a series of posts or pages—for building out a basic skeleton of a site, or for quickly populating content. Manually doing this within the WordPress dashboard can be tedious. This is where WP-CLI can save the day. In this post, I’ll look at how to use WP-CLI to quickly generate a series of posts within WordPress.

WP-CLI is a powerful tool that can be used to perform various tasks related to your website. For example, you can create new posts using the wp post create command:

The command is limited to creating a single post at a time. However, we can run multiple commands at once by separating them with a semicolon. So if we wanted to create two blog posts about one of the best Thai restaurants in London, we could run this command:

In order to make the above even easier, I wrote a handy tool that generates the command for you.

This tool is simple, but useful for quickly generating a small number of posts. With more time, a short bash script could loop through an array and perhaps support hierarchical post structures. For my purposes, this was sufficient and I wanted to share it in the hope that other people find it useful.

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