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Search results for "Drafts"

Use WhatsApp’s URL Scheme with Drafts, Launch Center Pro, Or A Bookmarklet

WhatsApp

WhatsApp

I don’t use WhatsApp much[1], but when I saw the app’s documentation last night with a mention of the URL scheme, I thought I could play around with it a little bit.

The WhatsApp URL scheme is extremely basic and there’s one part that I can’t get to work. The scheme itself is, unsurprisingly, whatsapp:// – which you can use from Launch Center Pro if you simply want to launch WhatsApp. There are also parameters to do stuff with the URL scheme: text lets you pass along a (properly encoded) text message that will be automatically inserted in the compose field of the app; abid lets you specificy an “Address Book ID” to send a message to a specific contact.

The WhatsApp team explains:

Address book ID of contact to start a chat with. If contact with this ID has only one whatsapp-able phone number, application will open a conversation with that contact. If contact with this ID has more than one whatsapp-able phone numbers, application will present a menu with all phone numbers available for chat. If contact has no whatsapp-able phone numbers, or contact with this ID does not exist, or this parameter is missing, application will present contact picker listing all contacts available for chat via WhatsApp.

I thought that something like the following URL would have let me send the text message “Test” to my contact “Alex”:

whatsapp://send?abid=Alex&text=Test

But, in practice, I wasn’t able to get the abid parameter to work. I have tried with phone numbers, percent-encoded names and phone numbers, email addresses, but I can’t get WhatsApp to recognize the abid parameter I pass along, as the app continues to present a contact picker. Therefore, for the purpose of this post, I will show you how to send text to WhatsApp, choosing a recipient from the app’s built-in contact picker. If you manage to get abid to work, please let me know. Read more

Sponsor: Drafts

Our thanks to Agile Tortoise for sponsoring MacStories this week with Drafts.

Drafts is the definitive scratchpad for your iPhone or iPad. It’s the fastest way to get any idea out of your head and onto something physical. You don’t have to come up with a title, choose a folder you’re going to save your text in, or even worry about formatting. Drafts intuitively keeps a blank page open for you, and even knows when previous drafts were written so you can recall your ideas later. It can integrate with services like Dropbox and Evernote so you can take your drafts anywhere.

Drafts supports Markdown, a markup language for generating text optimized for the web. And there’s little big things like action templates that makes everything actionable. Ultimately, Drafts can be your idea napkin, or a pro-tool that integrates seamlessly with most apps.

Drafts is available on the App Store. You can grab the iPhone version for $2.99, and the iPad version for $3.99. Learn more about Drafts and other Agile Tortoise apps here.

Share To Flipboard Magazines From Drafts

Flipboard

Flipboard

I’m a big fan of Flipboard’s magazine feature, which was introduced earlier this year with version 2.0 of the app. By leveraging Flipboard’s existing presentation style – capable of re-formatting web articles, videos, and photos with a beautiful print-like layout – magazines allow anyone to put together a collection of interesting links that others can subscribe to, read, and share. I am subscribed to dozens of Flipboard magazines and I send links to my Games one on a daily basis.

Most of my automation tips stem from minor annoyances with default solutions, so yesterday I decided to create a simple, yet effective Drafts URL action to easily open Flipboard’s share interface without having to read a webpage in the browser. Read more

Pocket Adds Drafts Sharing→

After an update that added support for Quotebook, Pocket for iOS has been updated today to let users send text to Agile Tortoise’s Drafts.

In the current implementation, the app will send an article’s title and shortened URL if no text is selected; if there is a text selection, Pocket will send quoted text and shortened URL to Drafts. I like it, but I wish there was a setting to send the shared link with its original, non-shortened URL.

I’m very glad Pocket added Drafts integration. In this way, you can tweak my Evernote workflows to, say, append bits of text to a single note.

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Add Multiple OmniFocus Actions at Once Using Drafts 3.0→

When editing my Drafts 3.0 review last night, I removed this sentence from the Reminders section:

“Again, I don’t use this functionality, but it’ll be interesting to see something like this being tweaked to work with Drafts and Reminders”

Sid O’Neill figured it out right away:

Drafts just updated today to version 3.0. There are a whack of new features but one that I’m most interested in is the new “list in Reminders” action. It makes it easy to add multiple actions to Omnifocus without requiring Pythonista.

I forgot Daniel Jalkut had a script to monitor Reminders and add todos to OmniFocus for Mac. If you’re like me, you know you’ll try to make this work with a Mac server and modified default sync times.

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Drafts 3 Review: Better iOS Automation and Workflows

Drafts3

Drafts3

In just a little more than a year, Agile Tortoise’s Drafts has gone from being a quick notepad for small bits of text to a full-featured solution for launching apps, using web services, and chaining multiple apps together – always with a focus on text. With version 2.5, released in January, developer Greg Pierce expanded upon Drafts’ existing support for URL schemes to let users build their own actions and share them with others; in the process, he also updated Drafts to handle advanced operations such as customizable Dropbox write access, strftime timestamps, and deeper x-callback-url support.

Drafts 3.0, released today, is a major update that refines several aspects of version 2.5 and brings powerful new features such as Evernote and Message actions, better action and draft management, tighter Reminders integration, and a way to backup and restore entire sets of actions.

I have been testing Drafts 3.0 for the past month, and, even more than Drafts 2.5, it has become an essential part of my daily workflow.

Read more

Linked Posts with Drafts and Poster

When we announced a new format for linked posts last week, I hadn’t set up a proper workflow to create linked posts on the iPhone and iPad. Driven by annoyance, I put together a Drafts action and a bookmarklet to help me post links to WordPress with or without additional text and quotes.

Our linked posts use a custom field to link back to the original source and format the clickable titles that you see on the site. Tom Witkin’s Poster is my default app to publish posts on MacStories from iOS, and, fortunately, it has support for calling and assigning values to custom fields from the URL scheme. On the other hand, Agile Tortoise’s Drafts, my favorite app to chain multiple actions together, can launch custom URL actions differentiating between the first line of a note and everything else after it. That seemed like a good opportunity to separate my source URL from any possible text I wanted to add to a linked post. Read more