I listened to the latest episode of Mac Power Users, where David, Katie, and my friend Bradley discussed their photo management workflows, the limitations of iPhoto and iCloud, and shared some tips on how to get the most of modern third-party photo services and Apple’s Photo Stream. It’s a great episode and a solid complement to our photo management episode on The Prompt, always with Bradley (he’s the photo management guru these days, having written a book on the topic). For both follow-up reasons and because it’s the new year and hence a good moment to re-evaluate how technology is supposed to be working for us, I thought I’d give an update on my photo management workflow.
Posts in tutorials
My Photo Management Workflow, Early 2014
Simulating Multiple Cursors in Editorial
When I’m writing with Editorial or Byword, I miss the multiple cursors feature of Sublime Text. Seemingly an extra geeky addition with no practical utility, multiple cursors had become part of my editing workflow as they allowed me to select multiple positions in a document and act on them at once. For example, I could select multiple lines and prefix them with an asterisk to turn them into a Markdown list, or select multiple instances of a word and modify them with a single keystroke without using Find/Replace or other hacks. The feature was built into Sublime and it was great. So of course I made a workflow for Editorial.
Because it’s the end of the year and I’m feeling festive and thankful, I’m posting two workflows to simulate multiple cursors in Editorial. The first one allows you to save selections for multiple bits of non-contiguous text at once and, when you’re done, wrap them inside any character(s); it’s useful if you want to make multiple words bold/italic, or if you want to enclose them inside parentheses. The second workflow lets you add inline Markdown links for each selection, fetching a webpage URL from the Editorial browser. Read more
Hardware Keyboards and iOS’ International Keyboard Layouts
I like my Logitech tablet keyboard: its build quality is good, battery seems to last forever, and it’s got handy special keys for Spotlight and the iOS Home button that work with iOS 7. However, as an Italian user who often writes in English and needs to switch between Italian and US keyboards, I was initially confused by iOS’ way of handling keyboard layouts. Hence, a quick tip. Read more
Two Nice Features of Fantastical 2.0.1
Fantastical 2 is the best calendar app for iPhone, and in my review I focused on the aspects that made it a more powerful and elegant solution than Apple’s Calendar and Reminders combined. Today’s 2.0.1 update brings, among bug fixes and improvements, two nice changes that I’d like to point out as they’ve made Fantastical even better for me.
Getting App Prices with Editorial
When I write on my iPad mini, I often need to look up and reference price of apps that I already own. That’s a surprisingly hard thing to do on an iOS device, so I decided to remove the annoyance caused by this problem with an Editorial workflow. I call it “Get App Price”.
If you own an app, searching for it in the iOS 7 App Store won’t show you the price information alongside the app’s icon and description – you’ll only get an Open or Install button. Unlike the Mac App Store, there is no separate pricing field in the app information at the bottom of the screen, which usually forces me to go to a developer’s website to find out what the price of an app is.1 There wouldn’t be any problem if Apple allowed Safari to open iTunes web previews without redirecting them straight to the App Store, which is what they do on OS X. I have tried to force Safari to open web previews, and I even downloaded browsers that can set a modified user agent string to trick iOS into thinking they’re desktop web browsers worthy of a web preview – eventually, the App Store app always opened, displaying no price.
I set out to create a simple workflow to fetch an app’s title and price directly from iTunes with no clipboard import or other middleman. I later found out that you can tap on the “Related” tab in the App Store or gift an app to view its price, but I had already created a workflow that’s faster than opening the App Store and tapping a bunch of buttons just to get a price. I’m a free man, and I deserve my own App Store lookup solution.2
A List of New iOS 7 Keyboard Shortcuts
With iOS 7, Apple has introduced the possibility for third-party developers to support custom shortcuts with external (Bluetooth) keyboards in their apps. Keyboard shortcuts, longtime favorites of OS X power users, can now be enabled in iOS apps and, in the past few months, we’ve seen some notable examples such as OmniOutliner by The Omni Group adding support for this feature.1
Apple itself has been experimenting with keyboard shortcuts in built-in iOS 7 apps, and I thought I’d provide a list of the ones that I’ve found to be working on iOS 7.0.3 with my iPad mini and a Logitech tablet keyboard due to the lack of official documentation. This list was inspired by Rui Carmo, who first found out about keyboard shortcuts in Safari for iOS 7. Since Rui’s post (and my link to it), the issues with the Logitech keyboard that he described have been fixed (the Spotlight key works on iOS 7.0.3) and I’ve collected some new shortcuts.
Right now, new keyboard shortcuts have only been added to Safari, Mail, and Pages in a very limited fashion. While they are consistent with their OS X counterparts, Apple has only brought a few of the Mac’s shortcuts to its iOS 7 apps, leaving other apps like Messages or Reminders without shortcut support. It’s likely that, with time, Apple will bring more shortcuts to Safari, Mail, and other stock apps. I couldn’t find official documentation on Apple’s website and I’ve tested every possible shortcut with a simple trial and error procedure on my iPad.
I will update this list regularly as Apple adds more keyboard shortcuts to its iOS apps. If you have discovered other keyboard shortcuts that are new to iOS 7 and haven’t been mentioned here, please ping me on Twitter or send me an email.
Update 11/11: New shortcuts added thanks to Steven Troughton-Smith.
Tweetbot Workflow: Upload and Share Dropbox Text Files
In Tweetbot 3, Tapbots removed the ability to post tweets longer than 140 characters using built-in services for text upload. While I understand that it wasn’t one of Tweetbot’s most used features, its removal got me thinking: would it be possible to replicate the feature using Dropbox and plain text files in an automated iOS workflow? I came up with a solution that requires Launch Center Pro and Drafts, and I’m quite happy with it.
Amount Conversions From Launch Center Pro
In September, I reviewed Amount, an elegant and easy to use unit converter for iPhone:
Amount is easy to use and ready for iOS 7 with a full-screen design and neat animations. It isn’t packed with advanced functionalities, but I’d definitely recommend it as a unit converter app for everyone.
Today, the app has been updated with a URL scheme that can be used to launch specific unit conversions from other apps. As documented by the developer, this is the URL scheme to use:
amount://convert?number=NUMBER&category=CATEGORY&unit=UNIT
The commands are rather self-explanatory: given a numeric input, a category (currency, length, data, etc), and a unit, you can launch Amount’s conversion screen with information already filled in for you. While you can set up this kind of shortcut with any app that lets you create URL scheme actions, the obvious implementation takes advantage of Launch Center Pro’s numeric keypad to simplify the process of typing numbers.
amount://convert?number=[prompt-num]&category=currency
With the action above, I can quickly type a numeric input in Launch Center Pro, tap launch, and then select the primary unit for a currency conversion in Amount, which will then display multiple results inline without switching screens. It’s a handy shortcut, and it doesn’t change Amount’s cool visualization of converted results.
Amount is available at $0.99 on the App Store.
Launch A Web Search In Safari From Other iOS Apps
In moving back to Safari as my main browser on every Apple device I own, I thought I should mention a hidden feature of Safari for iOS that I discovered a few months ago and that I remembered today thanks to a Twitter exchange between readers Jordan and Jerry.
On iOS, you can launch Safari directly in a web search page using this URL scheme:
x-web-search://?[query]
Where [query] is the text of your search query. Essentially, instead of having to launch Safari, tap the address bar, type your search query, and then tap Go, you can use an app like Drafts or Launch Center Pro to quickly type out your search query and send it to Safari, which will open a new tab for your search.
In Drafts (or any other app that lets you create custom URL scheme-based services like Launch Center Pro, Editorial, or Mr. Reader), simply create an action that sends the text you’ve typed to Safari’s web search. Here’s my action if you want to install it in your Drafts app.
The benefit of this search URL scheme is that it doesn’t care about the web search you prefer: it’ll continue to work based on the search provider that you pick in Settings > Safari, and, overall, it’s just a nice shortcut that lets you save a couple of taps every day.
As usual, make sure to percent-encode your query. If you use Drafts, the action above will do it for you.