![]() From the My Workflows view, tap Create Workflow. You start in the Workflow view, which comes with a few pre-installed examples. The way you create workflows is interesting. Workflow to append the title and URL of the current Web page to an Evernote note, which I find handy when compiling ExtraBITS candidates. With a few downloads from the gallery, you can save a full Web page to Dropbox, export a Web page as a PDF, extract all images from a Web page, view a Web page’s source code, search the Web site, or even view an older version of the page on the Wayback Machine. To my mind, Workflow is worth the cost of admission just for the way anyone can use it to extend Safari’s capabilities. ![]() You’re presented with workflows that you have designated as action extensions, as well as potentially useful extensions from the app’s gallery. To call a workflow from Safari, tap Share, and then Run Workflow. Scroll the bottom action row to the right and tap More.You can put workflows on your home screen as icons, or use them within Safari as action extensions. Make an animated GIF from a series of photos.Get the lyrics of the currently playing song.Send someone your estimated time of arrival.So what can you do with these workflows? Here are a few examples: Users can also share workflows over the Web. The app comes with useful, built-in workflows, and it offers a gallery of other workflows you can download. The beauty of Workflow is that you don’t have to be a programmer to take advantage of it. The design of the app is bright and friendly, making it ideal to learn or teach the basics of programming. What sets Workflow apart from past iOS automation efforts is that you can create workflows visually, with no traditional programming required. Those concerns might now be moot, thanks to DeskConnect’s Workflow ($2.99 in the App Store), which is the closest iOS has come to Automator’s powerful simplicity. You either have to learn a foreign syntax or work around the many limitations of iOS to get anything done. While these are all fun to play with, and are useful for certain people (like Federico Viticci of MacStories, who has written extensively about his experiments in iOS automation), they’re too difficult for average users. Then there’s Editorial, a powerful text editor that can be customized with the Python programming language and that can use x-callback-url to process text from other ![]() Launch Center Pro enables you to launch multiple apps from one place, as well as automatically perform certain actions with some of those apps. Agile Tortoise’s own Drafts app lets you jot down notes and share them with other apps and services, among other things. This led to some interesting experiments with iOS automation. Before the days of Extensibility in iOS 8, x-callback-url was the main way apps could toss information back and forth across iOS’s sandbox wall to communicate with each other. The most notable third-party development in iOS automation was x-callback-url, a clever, if kludgy, standard developed by Greg Pierce of Agile Tortoise. ![]() Just as with Mac automation, you can probablyĬome up with a lot of ideas for common tasks to automate with just a little thought. For instance, wouldn’t it be nice to call your spouse with one tap on a Dock icon? Or shorten a URL with a custom service and post it to Twitter? Maybe you take a lot of baby pictures, and would like to send the most recent photo to the grandparents quickly? Or if you’ve had a bit much to drink at a party, wouldn’t it be nice to request a car from a service like Uber to take you home with only a tap or two? These are all possible to automate on iOS. Easy as iOS is, if you think about it, there are probably common tasks you can make easier by stringing multiple actions together. If you use iOS more for consumption than creation, you might wonder why you’d want to automate iOS at all. Third-party developers have spent years trying to replicate Automator’s power and simplicity on iOS. Since Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was released in 2005, Mac users have had access to simple, built-in automation with Automator. #1670: Arc Web browser hits 1.0 release, “Do You Use It?” polls about Apple features.#1671: Apple Q3 2023 earnings, new Beats headphones and earbuds, Stage Manager adoption rate, do you use Spotlight?.1672: The hidden power of Google Sheets, Launchpad usage levels, Emergency SOS via satellite in the Maui fires, do you use proxy icons?.1673: macOS 13.5.1, watchOS 9.6.1, copy data from Web tables, what Spotlight is used for, do you use Apple’s Weather app?.1674: Proxy icons boost productivity, Arc 1.5 tab syncing, Backblaze price increase, which iPhone weather apps do you use?. ![]()
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