MacroDial

MacroDialAppIconDescription

Macro Dial is a tool to help edit and automatically change numbers from your address book according to some rules based on the way you want to call: IDD, calling card, corporate access number, without entering multiple entry in the phonebook.

Target Users

This program is intended to be useful for

  • people who travel and need to dial the same number in diverse way, for example you dial +813 5555 5555 to call japan when you are in Hong kong, but 03 5555 5555 when you are in japan.
  • People who have access to IDD prefix code, or use carrier like softbank in japan that do not process the + as expected.
  • People who have corporate access number that require processing of the number to extract the right extension.
  • People using multiple calling card from different countries.

Goal of the design of the program

  • provide a full set of rules to make any generation of numbers possible.
  • be able to share the rules via the internet. They can be downloaded without compromising personal codes or PINs.
  • have a simple way to enter rules as well as a more advanced complete mode.
  • provide the user workflow that fitted my need.

How to use it

  • Please read the main documentation page and the information how to create new macros
  • when you start the program a wizard will let you choose a few options or package of rules. Currently only for Japan Softbank or Hong Kong three, but you can download more from the web. If you have a code (from friends or from me) you can access rules specific to a company for example.
  • After you select a contact, you can choose the number and if you click on a rule (or macro) that rule will be applied to the number.
  • No number will ever be called without you pressing the call button, so you can review to make sure the number is correct.
  • To create a new rule you can simply edit the number in the Dial screen, and if a simple way to regenerate the number is detected the program will offer to save it as a new rules.
  • If you are a more advanced user you can design your rules from the edit macro function in the setting screen.

Recent Posts

4 years 8 months later… broke and works again

The number of ConnectStats users has dropped quite a bit over the years, but about a week ago I started seeing messages on the blog that it had stopped working.

Short version: it works again.

The last time I touched the ConnectStats server was four years and eight months ago (confirmed by my version control history). So when I saw those messages, I panicked — I genuinely didn’t remember how most of it worked. But here’s the thing: over the last few months I’ve fully embraced AI-assisted programming, first with Cursor and now especially my favorite tool, Claude Code.

So while I started looking at my old code and immediately felt overwhelmed, I asked Claude to look at the app code, the server code, and fed it the Garmin documentation for good measure. Within minutes it could walk me through the login workflow, tell me where to set breakpoints to understand the failure, and before long we’d pinpointed the issue: a disk on my server had filled up.

Claude then wrote a script to clean up inactive users — the kind of tedious, nerve-wracking maintenance task I’d been putting off for years. Disk space reclaimed, everything back online.

Even better, Claude now understands the full codebase and has suggested a bunch of cleanup improvements. I might actually start adding features again.

  1. Current Status, what works and what doesn’t 27 Replies
  2. A big steps toward fixing the issue 4 Replies
  3. Still working on it and issue with Strava 34 Replies
  4. Is this the beginning of the end? 9 Replies
  5. Running Effectiveness and historical statistics improvement 14 Replies
  6. Notifications in ConnectStats 3 Replies
  7. Detailed Comparison of Running and Cycling Statistics over time 6 Replies
  8. Garmin Service Error 14 Replies
  9. AppStore Submission Rejection Syndrome 5 Replies