Though Touch Portal has its own backup mechanism and you can use that to share settings it does take a few clicks and a bit of attention. When you quickly want to share stuff that's not what you want.
I created a few batch files and two buttons to speed things up. Here's my approach.
Datatalk + Touch Portal + OBS
Lots of overly long explanations on YouTube. Here's my approach to backup / migrate OBS and TouchPortal settings.
Sometimes you want to launch another application from within TouchPortal, and it simply won't work, or behave oddly. I had a lot of troubles launching good old PhotoImpact X3 from TouchPortal, but thank heavens someone in the TouchPortal Discord suggested to use compatibility mode... Pfew!
Here are some things to try...
Touch Portal and OBS Studio are the (low cost) alternative to Elgato's Stream Deck and other Elgato solutions.
This page offers a quick overview of how to install and migrate both apps.
Upfront: this is a bit of a kludge, and I'll be looking for a better option, as soon as I can find one. But it taught me things...
Anyway, with the ever-increasing price of electricity, I was wondering if I could not simply switch off my home server upon command. In the past, I used a timed-out, which worked fine, but there are other users in my household, and they're not always computer-savvy.
Why doesn't Windows have a, per application, setting to allow that specific application to be brought to the front by other apps and itself? It would save a lot of headaches.
I've updated immprep.exe, fixing two small bugs, and adding Word (.docx) support. Note that the command line parameters have changed, to allow for more flexibility, and support for other TTS applications (not yet implemented, but it's easier to do now). When working on Word support I ran into a few issues (for the full story and latest version of ImmPrep read on).
You can launch Chrome with a specific user profile, but, unfortunately, there's no easy way AFAIK to discern which profile number matches a specific profile name. Here's a. how to figure out the profile number, and b. how to share batch files and scripts over different machines with different profile names.
Why? Because you might use the same website with different profiles, ie. settings, and you don't want to manually log out and in again.
Touch Portal 3.1 now supports OBS 28. You no longer need to download and install the websocket, but you need to enable it inside OBS 28, and make sure the port is set properly in both Touch Portal and OBS 28 (default 4455)
I like Touch Portal but found the conversion of .ico to something Touch Portal can understand a pain, so I modified WallX a bit to make the process easier.
Writing / Datatalk / TTS.
Windows has a build-in TTS engine which is better than the older SAPI5 engine, but... it's a little hard to get at. And silly enough, any regular program (for example Balabolka) that calls the SAPI5 API routines isn't using the new code in Windows.
But it's actually very easy to use with a little workaround! And the quality is definitely better than, for example, Word's built-in TTS tool.
Touch Portal is a low-cost alternative to the Stream Deck.
Here's a little example on how to cycle through different pictos when pressing a button.
You'd expect to find tons of apps that would claim to aid in monitor calibration, but there aren't that many... and the few I tried were not very impressive. So, unless you have an actual colorimeter, you're pretty much on your own.
I tried some things but in the end I had to settle for the cheapest solution: eyeball it. (Which is always wrong, but sometimes all that's left.)
