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Posts tagged with "automation"

Terminology Workflows For Editorial→

Greg Pierce:

Terminology has always had great direct integration with our own apps, Drafts and Phraseology that allows you to easily lookup and select replacement words and have them directly replaced inline with your editing. You can see that integration in action.

In the latest version (3.0.6) of Terminology, I added a tweak to its URL schemes to allow it to integrate more easily with certain other apps, particularly Editorial, Ole Moritz’s excellent iPad text editor.

Terminology is my favorite dictionary app and I wish Editorial had a popover to replace Apple’s default dictionary, like Instapaper did. The workflows are the best alternative to that for now, and they work well.

It would be nice to have selectable synonyms and antonyms built into the system dictionary in iOS 8.

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Insert Markdown Image Links Interactively with Editorial→

Stefan Wolfrum:

Because the markdown documents I write contain usually a few images from web sites I research (not from my iPad image library) and because Editorial includes its own web browser I asked myself: why can’t I just somehow insert a markdown image link in my document to an image that’s on the web page I see in Editorial’s browser? Either I’m missing something or it just isn’t there (yet). Well, because I’m always eager to learn I started to implement exactly that.

One of the most clever workflows I’ve seen in a while. I’m using a similar trick in my Feed Wrangler workflows, and Stefan’s idea can be easily repurposed for other scenarios. Well done.

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Simulating Multiple Cursors in Editorial

Editorial

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

Launch Center Pro 2.1: Fleksy Keyboard, Lists, Photo Attachments, and Share Sheets

Launch Center Pro 2.1

Launch Center Pro 2.1

In October, Contrast released Launch Center Pro 2.0, a free update to their shortcut launcher and automation tool for iOS that brought a new interface for iOS 7 and, among other minor additions, Dropbox integration. Launch Center Pro is one of the three apps I keep in my dock[1], and I use it several times a day to create new tasks in Fantastical, launch Google searches, open my favorite websites, and more.

Today, Contrast is launching Launch Center Pro 2.1, a seemingly not-so-major update that, however, brings important changes to the app, including a new way to build visual actions and support for the new third-party Fleksy keyboard. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that version 2.1 is just as important as 2.0 for heavy users of Launch Center Pro. Read more

Automate iOS Contacts, Location Services, and Open In Menu with Pythonista 1.4

Pythonista 1.4

Pythonista 1.4

Pythonista is the app that changed my iOS workflow a year ago. A Python interpreter with native access to iOS system features like photos, URLs, and interface elements, Pythonista allowed me to convert the scripts and macros that I was using on OS X to the iPad, automating iOS in better and sometimes unexpected ways. Pythonista eventually led to Editorial, also developed by Ole Zorn, which changed the way I write and work on my iPad every day.

Pythonista 1.4, available today on the App Store, is the biggest update to Zorn’s app to date. It includes a new UI for iOS 7 (the app is also iOS 7-only starting today), new modules and enhancements to existing ones, and, more importantly, it doubles down on iOS integration by bringing native support for contacts, location, and Open In. Read more

IFTTT 1.2→

Released earlier this week, IFTTT for iOS 1.2 improves on native Reminders and Photos integration by allowing users to create recipes that save new items into the Reminders and Photos apps. Previously, IFTTT could only read data from Reminders and Photos and use that as a trigger for other actions.

I wanted to wait a couple of days before posting about this update to test how frequently the new background refresh API in iOS 7 would let IFTTT check for triggers and launch recipes. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen notable changes in execution times – for instance, bookmarks that I add on Pinboard sometimes take about an hour to be added to Reminders. My understanding is that IFTTT isn’t using silent push notifications to instantly trigger recipes in your account, therefore iOS 7 background app refresh can make the app check for updates more often in the long term, but that will require several weeks of testing. Thus, I’m happy to keep testing the feature and report back.

The improved Reminders and Photos integration is very nice. You can add new photos from URLs, create reminders into a specific list, and even set a priority for them. I wouldn’t rely on Reminders integration to save work-related tasks, but I find it very useful to let IFTTT check on, say, Instagram or Facebook from time to time and save the photos I want locally on my device.

I’m still impressed by what IFTTT is doing with their iOS app, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next for iOS 7 background sync.

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Resolve and Clean URLs with Clean Links for iOS

Clean Links

Clean Links

In July, I wrote about my Pythonista script to resolve and clean URLs copied from apps that used shortening services. Clean Links, developed by Griffin Caprio, is a free iOS app that does more than my script as it resolves URLs, removes useless parameters, and supports x-callback-url for inter-app communication.

Clean Links’ sole purpose is to receive a URL that was shortened, put behind a proxy, or cluttered with parameters/tokens and turn it into the clean, basic version that’s the one you want to share with your friends and followers.1 Clean Links can resolve YouTube URLs, links to blog posts generated by FeedBurner, classic Bitly URLs, and more. In my tests, Clean Links never failed to clean up a URL that I gave to it – the recent addition of YouTube URL support is extremely welcome as YouTube mobile redirects are particularly annoying. By default, Clean Links cleans a URL you’ve copied and puts the cleaned version back in the iOS clipboard.

With callbacks, Clean Links can be used with other apps as a “URL cleaning service” in the middle of a workflow. Here’s an example: I’ve found a link in Tweetbot and I want to tweet it, but the URL is ugly. With Clean Links, I can copy the URL and launch this Launch Center Pro action to have it cleaned up and return to Tweetbot’s Compose screen automatically. Or, with this action, you can resolve a URL and automatically add it to the “URL” field of a new event in Fantastical 2.

A tip for x-callback-url power users: when chained to other apps, Clean Links can automatically insert text not by using clipboard hacks, but through a “return parameter” called retParam. If you take a look at the URL schemes that power the actions above, you’ll see that, for Tweetbot, the text parameter is omitted from the Tweetbot URL scheme and given to retParam (same concept for Fantastical). If you want to pass along cleaned URLs with x-callback-url keep this in mind and take a look at the app’s documentation.

Clean Links has a very utilitarian approach to the problem it solves: it’s powerful, but it doesn’t come with a pretty UI for iOS 7. You’re not supposed to be looking at Clean Links all the time though, and the app’s functionality makes it the best solution to clean URLs and send them to other apps I’ve found. Clean Links is Universal and available for free on the App Store.

  1. Tweeting URLs with “mobile.” domains and UTM tokens is comparable to this. ↩︎

Tweetbot Workflow: Upload and Share Dropbox Text Files

Tweetbot workflow

Tweetbot workflow

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.

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