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Zapier Launches Multi-Step Zaps for Richer Web Automation

The new multi-step editor in Zapier.

The new multi-step editor in Zapier.

I’ve long been interested in web automation as a complement to my iOS apps and workflows. While I expressed my fair share of skepticism about the practical benefits of web automation in the past – primarily due to a lack of native apps to trigger recipes on IFTTT and Zapier – with time I’ve learned to appreciate the ability to automate web services and let them perform tedious tasks for me. The fact that I’m increasingly relying on web services with iOS apps that are simple front-ends to data that lives in the cloud might be related, too.1 My use of web automation isn’t dramatically creative: I have a couple of Do Button recipes to send automated emails with one tap; I forward YouTube updates and some RSS items to Slack; and, I let a couple of Twitter accounts tweet on my behalf with automated recipes because I’d forget otherwise. Nothing too revolutionary.

Today, Zapier – the power-user (and paid) alternative to IFTTT – is launching multi-step zaps (the equivalent of recipes in IFTTT), which I was able to test for the past week. I’ve long preferred Zapier to IFTTT for the additional controls that it offers when building complex web automations. Zapier lets you assign filters to actions, you can parse data from email messages with a dedicated Zapier Parser service, and, generally speaking, everything is built with an eye for people who, like me, want to tweak as much as possible. Multi-step zaps fit squarely into this strategy and they’re, by far, the most powerful solution I’ve tried to chain multiple web services together and save time.

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Airmail for iPhone Review: Power User Email

If you want to drive an average tech nerd crazy, try to talk about email clients.

Over the course of (almost) seven years of writing for MacStories, I’ve seen email pronounced dead (multiple times), reinvented, redesigned, and, most recently, made smarter with machine learning and cloud services. Email has been deemed unfixable, unmanageable, and unhealthy. And yet, for better or worse, we keep using it.

Despite its archaic nature and stale protocols, email works – it’s the closest thing to a common standard for digital communication we have. Messaging services may rise and grow and fall and shut down, but email will always be there, humbly humming along, hoarding thousands of unread messages in your inbox. You have to believe that, if this planet were to end tomorrow, cockroaches and IMAP would survive it.

I have written my fair share of email client reviews since 2009, and I’ve made my stance on what I’m looking for abundantly clear. I like my email client to bear the speed and polish of Microsoft’s Outlook, the clever touches and integrations of Dispatch, and, if possible, the smart options of Inbox and Spark. The fact that, eight years into the App Store, I’m still cherry-picking my ideal set of features for an email client says a lot about the landscape. Every time a new email client is released, you will find users who are perfectly content with it, others who prefer the built-in app on their devices, and some who are intrigued, but still unhappily waiting for the email client of their dreams to be made.

In case you’re wondering, I’m that guy in the last group, assembling yet another email client review, making a list of ideal email features for an iOS app.

And I actually love it, because the past 12 months have brought a ton of interesting changes in the email market for iPhone and iPad. Perhaps most notably, Microsoft surprised iOS users with a solid client, evolved from an acquisition and quickly improved to accommodate fast search and notifications, calendar integration, and full iOS 9 support. Outlook – a runner-up to my App of the Year in 2015 – is the email app I recommend to anyone who wants to try something different than Mail. Spark, launched by Readdle last year, has received a series of improvements with the promise of future Mac and iPad versions. The power-user oriented Dispatch has also continued to grow, with an eye for iPad users adopting iOS 9. And, reinvigorated by the demise of Mailbox, dozens of other developers have tried (or have kept trying) their hand at improving email on iOS. There was a time when Apple didn’t even accept third-party email clients on the App Store; today, you can find hundreds of similar and drastically different takes on email on the Store.

Developed by Italian indie studio Bloop, Airmail was first released on OS X in early 2013, capitalizing on the shutdown of Sparrow with a design reminiscent of that popular client acquired by Google (which, in turn, borrowed heavily from Loren Brichter’s Tweetie, the grandfather of those kinds of interfaces). Through the years, Airmail has become one of the most powerful email apps for the Mac, with support for multiple accounts, keyboard shortcuts, and a long list of preferences to tweak the app to your needs. Airmail is up there with MailMate in the club of desktop email clients that allow you to configure and fiddle with settings to make email as welcoming as it could possibly be.

Bloop is hoping to replicate its desktop success with Airmail for iPhone, launching today on the App Store at $4.99. I’ve been trying Airmail for the past couple of months, and it brings some unique features and options to the table, but, as usual, the road ahead is going to be long.

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Apple’s ‘Shot on iPhone’ Campaign Continues→

Josh Raab, reporting for Time:

Following last year’s Shot on iPhone 6 campaign, Apple is bringing back the concept for the iPhone 6s.

The new ad campaign features 53 images from 41 amateurs and professional photographers from around the world.

While the previous campaign included a variety of photographic subjects – from landscapes to extreme close-ups – this time, Apple has put the focus on portraits, most of them photographed in subtle, everyday moments.

Some great shots in this updated campaign for the iPhone 6s. Billboards have started going up around the world today – I assume a new World Gallery webpage is launching soon, too.

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Improving the iOS Keyboard Switching Experience for Multilingual Users

Wang Ling has an interesting proposal to improve the iOS keyboard experience for international users who frequently switch between keyboards:

If you are a monolingual user you are unlikely to feel the need of a separate group of occasionally-used keyboard. Most of you enable at most two keyboards, your language keyboard and Emoji keyboard. Switching between two keyboards is never an issue because it never incurs unnecessary inconvenience. You always switch to your target keyboard directly and immediately.

However, if you are a multilingual user like me or many other Chinese (I guess also many other English-as-second-language users) users, things are very different. We use both Chinese and English keyboards. We type mixture of Chinese and English very often so we need to switch between the two frequently. If Chinese and English are the only keyboard we use there will be no issues, as explained above. But Emoji is fun and we also want to use it, occasionally.

Replace “Chinese” with “Italian”, and that’s me. Every day, I’m constantly switching between the Italian and US English keyboards on my iOS devices and the experience is slow and annoying. Once you throw in a couple of additional keyboards in the mix (I use Emoji and Copied) the only sensible way to switch keyboards is tapping & holding the globe button then sliding over to the keyboard you want to use again – which takes about 1 second in my experience. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but the annoyance adds up; plus, imagine doing that for years. Assuming I switch between English and Italian keyboards 50 times a day (and I’m lowballing here), I can say I lose about 5 hours/year to this keyboard switching dance on iOS.

This won’t seem like a big deal to monolingual users, but trust me – it’s one of the most tedious aspects of working and communicating with others on iOS.

I see two possible solutions: either Apple implements something close to Ling’s idea with separate shortcuts for frequent and occasional keyboards, or, even better, they build a smarter, unified keyboard that automatically recognizes multiple languages at a time (though that obviously wouldn’t work for Chinese and other non-QWERTY keyboards).

Facebook to Shut Down Parse→

Mike Isaac and Quentin Hardy, reporting for The New York Times:

Facebook acquired Parse, a toolkit and support system for mobile developers, in 2013. At the time, the social network’s ambitions were high: Parse would be Facebook’s way into one day harnessing developers to become a true cloud business, competing alongside the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Those ambitions, it seems, have fallen back to earth. On Thursday, Facebook said it plans to shut down Parse, the services platform for which it paid upwards of a reported $85 million.

And from the announcement on the Parse blog:

We understand that this won’t be an easy transition, and we’re working hard to make this process as easy as possible. We are committed to maintaining the backend service during the sunset period, and are providing several tools to help migrate applications to other services.

Parse provided a series of online backend tools for app developers, and this will certainly be a hassle for those who implemented Parse services in their iOS apps. Not to mention apps that were built on top of Parse and then abandoned – while those apps may still be working on modern versions of iOS thanks to backwards API compatibility, they will stop working once Parse – the online component – shuts down for good.

Below, I’ve compiled a list of some reactions from the developer community to the Parse announcement. See also: Connected #13 from November 2014 on App Store preservation.

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Connected: Explosion of Glue and Colors→

This week, the Connected crew talk about Myke’s new security system, Podcasts.app on the Apple TV, iPhone 5se rumors, Garageband and Crashlands.

On this week’s Connected, we tried to convince Stephen to play Crashlands. I don’t think we succeeded. You can listen here.

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Deliveries 7.0→

Terrific update to one of my most used apps for iPhone and iPad: Deliveries by Junecloud. As someone who’s buying more and more from Amazon every year – all our 2015 Christmas gifts came from Amazon, for instance – Deliveries has turned into an essential utility to keep track of multiple orders at once without visiting the Amazon website (which is ugly and slow).

Today’s major update has brought full iOS 9 support (3D Touch, Spotlight, multitasking, Safari View Controller, etc.), better iCloud sync, improved clipboard detection and, my favorite, the ability to select any text, tap the ‘Share’ button of the copy & paste menu, and feed text to the Deliveries extension, which will parse order numbers automatically. This app is so good, I wish I could buy it multiple times.

See also: Deliveries 2.0 for Mac, released today on the Mac App Store.

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Office for iOS Gets New Storage Integrations

For nearly two months now, I’ve been using Microsoft’s Office apps for my accounting and other MacStories projects; I’ve also begun moving my cloud file management to Box. Hence, I’m glad that Microsoft has started expanding Office’s file management abilities on iOS, adding the option to import (and sync) files directly from Box in addition to Dropbox.

Microsoft’s Kirk Koenigsbauer, writing on the Office blog:

Starting today, in addition to Dropbox, we’re offering all CSPP partners the opportunity to tightly integrate with Office for iOS. This integration lets users designate these partner cloud services as “places” in Office, just as they can with Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox. Users can now browse for PowerPoint, Word and Excel files on their favorite cloud service right from within an Office app. They can open, edit or create in these apps with confidence that their files will be updated right in the cloud. Users can also open Office files from their cloud storage app in Office, then save any changes directly back to the cloud. We’ll follow with other mobile platforms later this year.

Here’s how it works: in Office for iOS, switch to the ‘Open’ section, then tap ‘Add a Place’ and pick Box from the list of available services. This will create a custom Box (or Dropbox) file browser in the app, allowing you to pick any file, edit it, and keep it in the ‘Recent’ view for easier access.

Adding Box as a source in the Word for iOS.

Adding Box as a source in the Word for iOS.

The key advantage of this native integration over opening a file with the iOS document picker is that, once added, a Box or Dropbox file will continuously sync changes between Office and the cloud, making your edits available anywhere.

As I discussed with Fraser on Canvas, while Microsoft is one of the companies that properly support document providers on iOS with open mode for files, document providers can still be finicky at a system level (for example, an “opened” file may stop communicating with the originating app occasionally), and they’re slower for browsing files. The custom integration is still superior, even if it requires you to authenticate again. From my first tests today, native Box support in Word already seems more stable than the old method based on “opening” files from the Box document provider.

The other big news from the Office team today is that real-time collaboration for Office Online is now also available for documents stored in external services. This means that you will be able to co-author documents with other people even if you keep your Office files in Dropbox or Box. At this point, and given Google’s shortsighted approach to iOS and collaboration in their apps, I have to ask: how long until Office gets real-time collaboration with external services on mobile too?