Wednesday, May 28, 2025

Move your existing Greenlight account to the free US Bank option: you can't do it on macOS desktop

If you have a GreenLight family debit card and are a US Bank checking customer, you can, in theory, link the GreenLight account to the US Bank checking account and save $72 a year. If you do this you lose some Greenlight features (investing, maybe some others) I don't care about, and after the migration some functions move to the US Bank app:

  1. Sending money to "kids" and viewing balance is through the US Bank app.
  2. Greenlight app for setting spending limits, managing chores, pay allowance, etc.

I got an email about this from US Bank, very thoughtfully clicked the macOS Mail.app email link, clicked Approve on the form ... and nothing happened. Even with popups enabled:

I was able to workaround the bug. There are two things I did but I think the big one is the first.
  1. I had to click the link in the US Bank mail I received on mobile, not on desktop. I don't think this works on desktop at all! There's no GreenLight desktop access (mobile only), and since the mobile process invokes the GreenLight app I don't see how it would work on desktop even if there wasn't a bug with this form. US Bank contractors coded the page for use on mobile but didn't consider that somebody might click an email link from a desktop app.
  2. I thought at first there was a problem because my funding source was already my US Bank checking account. So I switched to using my US Bank debit card and remove the checking account. After I migrated I reversed this. I don't think this was necessary however.
So, basically, I think the GreenLight to US Bank migration is actually mobile only, even though clicking an email link from macOS will initiate the migration in a browser. If I'm right the web page needs to check that it's running on mobile, and display the appropriate error message.

Thursday, May 08, 2025

Word Services in macOS Sequoia: reenabling after migration

When I migrated from Mojave to Sequoia (with a pause at Monterey I think) I lost the word services I liked. Today I finally investigated and figured out they came from DevonThink's free WordService "app". During the migration they were disabled, so I had to relearn how they work (macOS needs AI for searches of system settings -- because obviously Apple will never do the obvious fixes):

Now go into System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services > Text and you’ll see several services prefixed with WordService. Enable the ones you’re interested in, e.g., WordService: All Caps. If it’s a command you think you’d use often, you may want to assign a hotkey. Double-click the shortcut field to the right and enter a shortcut for the desired service.

I had to reenable my preferred services. Some of them don't seem to work now but most do. They are big timesavers for me. Reformat is particularly appreciated. From the help file:

A combination of Trim Lines, Remove Line Endings, Remove Multiple Spaces and Remove Quotes preserving paragraphs.

Devon Technologies has several free and valued utilities. I use EasyFind and WordService.