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Chris White’s iOS Workflows→

Chris White’s iOS Workflows

Chris White is putting together an impressive collection of JavaScript bookmarklets, URL schemes, and iOS services and actions in a GitHub repo:

It seems like we’ve recently been seeing a ton of new ideas, clever tricks and tools for making users who are willing to dive into the deep-end more productive on our iOS devices through automation, seamless app communication and some really great shortcuts. This is a collection of bookmarklets, scripts and custom URL scheme actions that help bridge apps and manipulate the data you can send between them.

Chris included some of my bookmarklets and URL schemes in his collection, which I recommend checking out if you’re looking for a single place containing several moderately advanced tips for doing more than just launching apps via URLs.

iOS automation is, of course, a subject that I’ve been covering on a daily basis on MacStories for the past months. While I haven’t had the time to put together a GitHub repo like Chris did, allow me to list the various articles and tag pages where you can get started:

URL scheme tag page

Bookmarklet tag page

Automation with Drafts and Chaining Apps with Drafts

Pythonista review and scripts

Pythonista tag

I’m very glad Chris decided to collect these resources in a repo. I especially like the Drafts bookmarklets he made, which contain a check to see whether the browser has an active text selection (something I haven’t been doing as I’ve always created separate bookmarklets for Chrome and Safari).

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Apple, Adobe & Microsoft Forced To Appear Before Australian IT Pricing Inquiry

Apple, Microsoft and Adobe have been summoned to appear before a Federal Australian Parliamantery Committee that has been investigating IT pricing in Australia. The move forces the three companies to appear on March 22nd after they had refused to do so voluntarily. Ed Husic, a driving member behind the creation of the committee and one of its members, put out a press release welcoming the move, but stating it is one “we shouldn’t have to take”.

 “Adobe, Apple and Microsoft are just a few firms that have continually defied the public’s call for answers and refused to appear before the IT Pricing Inquiry.”

The IT Pricing Inquiry has been examing whether a price difference exists between Australian and international pricing of IT goods and services, and if so, why they exist, what impact they have and what actions can be taken to reduce the disadvantage of Australian consumers. Formed in May last year, the committee received 100 submissions from individuals, organisations and companies and has so far held 5 public hearings which included the appearance of Australian Recording Industry Association, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, consumer group CHOICE and many others.

It should be noted that Apple, Microsoft and Adobe all made written submissions to the Committee but refused to appear before the committee to answer questions of the committee members.

Chaining Multiple Apps Together with Drafts

A few weeks ago, I took a look at the automation possibilities opened by Drafts, Agile Tortoise’s multi-purpose text app. In the article, I mentioned how a bug prevented Drafts from “linking to itself” more than once:

Therefore, my idea for cross-posting was: I can link to Drafts itself, and if the first action is successful, I can link to Drafts itself again. Essentially, I wanted to leverage the built-in App.net and Twitter actions to avoid the use of any third-party app. Unfortunately, there’s a bug in the current version of Drafts that doesn’t make that kind of action work.

With an update to Drafts released yesterday, Greg Pierce has brought various improvements to the app, including support for more customizable timestamps and dates using strftime, date and time tags for file names and URL actions, and a new way to encode strings with curly brackets.

Seemingly minor, the option to more easily URL encode strings is actually a very welcome addition: like in the latest Mr. Reader, instead of forcing the user to encode a URL into a longer string, you can simply put a URL inside {{ }} and let Drafts take care of encoding it. It means I can now experiment with building more complex workflows that contain actions for more external apps and, more importantly, for “sequential” tasks in Drafts itself. Easier encoding means we construct URLs that will tell Drafts “do this, and then do that” in a single workflow.

Those who follow me on Twitter know that I’ve been trying since yesterday to see how many apps I could chain together in a workflow, mainly out of curiosity and as a “proof” of concept. First, I tweeted about a Mr. Reader -> Drafts -> Poster workflow that would take selected text from an article, convert its Markdown to HTML, and then send it to Poster; the workflow consisted of three apps chained together, but I knew I could try to accomplish something a bit more ambitious. I kept on experimenting with Drafts URLs, and eventually I managed to build a single workflow with 3 apps and 4 different tasks involved. I’m posting it here for two reasons: a) I believe it’s a quite useful workflow; and b) it can serve as an example of what Drafts can do when you understand how to properly link multiple apps together. Read more

Good.iWare Announces GoodReader SDK With “Save Back” Feature→

Good.iWare Announces GoodReader SDK With “Save Back” Feature

Good.iWare, the company behind popular iOS file manager and document annotation tool GoodReader, has announced an SDK to let third-party developers send files and folders to GoodReader and receive them back after GoodReader has read/annotated them.

If you have an app that generates or downloads files meant to be read and annotated, and you want to use GoodReader’s powerful engine to do that, you can take advantage of our new SendToGoodReader SDK. This SDK is absolutely free of charge.

As explained on a dedicated developer page, the SDK seems more oriented towards PDF documents for now, but Good.iWare also mentions “complex collections” of files and folders:

If you’re a developer of iOS apps interested in offering your customers a convenient way to use powerful GoodReader’s abilities to read and annotate PDF files, you’ve come to the right place.

What’s interesting about this solution is that a “Save Back” feature should allow users to avoid the creation of duplicates by first receiving a file in GoodReader and then moving it – not copying it – back to the original app that “called” GoodReader. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the creation of duplicates is one of the biggest downsides of Apple’s Open In menu:

You just used five apps and created four copies of a file (two of them are iOS Camera Roll + Photo Stream) to annotate a photo. Lather, rinse, repeat for note taking, PDF reading, electronic bill management, and assembling that nice slideshow of your vacation in Italy.

I say “should” because I haven’t been able to try any app with support for GoodReader’s SDK yet, but that’s my takeaway from the developers’ explanation.

If GoodReader’s “Save Back” feature turns out to be what I imagine it is, it has the potential to become a great addition to existing Open In implementations, and perhaps even a possible path Apple could consider for a future version of iOS. I believe better communication between different apps is an area where iOS is severely lacking, and this concept – “saving back” and moving files instead of duplicating them – if implemented correctly could become, essentially, the x-callback-url of files. The obvious limitation is that the SDK is limited to GoodReader, and that there are no apps supporting it yet. I’m thinking of how Evernote could take advantage of this by letting users annotate PDFs in GoodReader, or how a mail application could let GoodReader unzip an archive and receive an uncompressed version with two taps. The possibilities are certainly intriguing.

It’s too early to say whether GoodReader’s experiment will be successful, but I think “saving back” is a much better idea than “opening in”.

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A Better App Store

Better App Store

Better App Store

Marco Tabini has a good overview of how the App Store (both for iOS and OS X) could use some improvements now that the 1 million app milestone is in sight. I particularly agree with his points on curation:

Given the sheer volume of apps on the App Stores, Apple’s role in curating them is becoming more and more important. The company’s notoriously tight grip on its distribution channels is often the source of much controversy, but there’s no denying that, by and large, it promotes all apps on an even field: In any given week, the latest release from a giant like, say, Electronic Arts could share the “Editor’s Pick” spot with an app written by an equally talented—but much more wallet-impaired—team of independent developers.

App Store curation is a topic I have been covering on MacStories for the past year, so Marco’s observations resonate with me. Looking back at my Four Years of App Store article from May 2012, it’s clear that the App Store team has done a very good job in increasing “human curation” with custom sections and weekly features, but there’s still lots of work to be done. So, with the one-million app mark approaching, I thought this could be a good time to offer some suggestions for improvements (you’ve probably already seen a lot of these as tweets in my Twitter timeline).

Read more

iWatch Potential→

iWatch Potential

Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini, Apple employee #66 and founder of the Human Interface Group, has published a great post on the potential of the “iWatch” – a so-called smartwatch Apple could release in the near future (via MG Siegler). While I haven’t been exactly excited by the features offered by current smartwatches – namely, the Pebble and other Bluetooth-based watches – the possibilities explored by Bruce made me think about a future ecosystem where, essentially, the iPhone will “think” in the background and the iWatch will “talk” directly to us. I believe that having bulky smartwatches with high-end CPUs won’t be nearly as important as ensuring a reliable, constant connection between lightweight wearable devices and the “real” computers in our pocket – smartphones.

The entire post is worth a read, so I’ll just highlight a specific paragraph about health tracking:

Having the watch facilitate a basic test like blood pressure monitoring would be a god-send, but probably at prohibitive cost in dollars, size, and energy. However, people will write apps that will carry out other medical tests that will end up surprising us, such as tests for early detection of tremor, etc. The watch could also act as a store-and-forward data collector for other more specialized devices, cutting back the cost of specialized sensors that would then need be little more than a sensor, a Blue Tooth chip, and a battery. Because the watch is always with us, it will be able to deliver a long-term data stream, rather than a limited snapshot, providing insight often missing from tests administered in a doctor’s office.

Dealing with all sorts of blood, temperature, and pressure tests on a regular basis, I can tell you that data sets that span weeks and months – building “archives” of a patient with graphs and charts, for instance – has, nowadays, too much friction. Monitoring blood pressure is still done with dedicated devices that most people don’t know how to operate. But imagine accurate, industry-certified, low-energy sensors capable of monitoring this kind of data and sending it back automatically to an iPhone for further processing, and you can see how friction could be removed while a) making people’s lives better and b) building data sets that don’t require any user input (you’d be surprised to know how much data can be extrapolated from the combination of “simple” tests like blood pressure monitoring and body temperature).

The health aspect of a possible “iWatch” is just a side of a device that Apple may or may not release any time soon. While I’m not sure about some of the ideas proposed by Bruce (passcode locks seem overly complex when the devices themselves could have biometric scanners built-in; Siri conversations in public still feel awkward and the service is far from responsive, especially on 3G), I believe others are definitley in the realm of technologically feasible and actually beneficial to the users (and Apple). Imagine crowdsourced data from the iWatch when applied to Maps or the iWatch being able to “tell us” about upcoming appointments or reminders when we’re driving so we won’t have to reach out to an iPhone (combine iWatch vibrations and “always-on” display with Siri Eyes Free and you get the idea).

As our iPhones grow more powerful and connected on each generation, I like to think that, in a not-so distant future, some of that power will be used to compute data from wearable devices that have a more direct connection to us and the world around us.

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Horizon Integrates Weather With Your Calendar→

Horizon Integrates Weather With Your Calendar

Horizon

Horizon

My wish for a better iPhone calendar app was granted by Flexibits with Fantastical, but Horizon, a new app by Kyle Rosenbluth, is worth a mention. Horizon integrates weather information with your calendar, providing an elegant overview of events and weather forecasts in a clean interface.

Horizon’s main screen shows a list of the next few days in your calendar; you can swipe down on the month’s name in the title bar to bring up a 30-day overview of the current month. In month view, “today” has a gray indicator, and events are shown as thin colored lines: a day with only one event will have one line, while busier days will have multiple lines. You can tap & hold a day to quickly create an event, and you can swipe horizontally to switch to the previous or next month.

The core aspect of Horizon is how it mixes weather with event information. When creating a new event, the app uses Google location data (which I found to be the best provider here in Italy) to show a list of suggestions in a bar above the keyboard; once you’ve chosen a location, Horizon will fetch a weather forecast (up to 14 days out). The app was created for people who deal with appointments in multiple locations on a daily basis: by entering a single day’s view, you’ll see a list of all your upcoming events alongside their respective locations and weather forecasts. A colored bar at the top can be swiped to show more weather information for each event (a weather icon, temperature, and chance of rain).

I like how Horizon presents different data sets without cluttering the interface. The app comes with neat animations, a focus on current and future events (past days are hidden from the main list), and a night mode if you’re not into the default white color scheme. I highly recommend Horizon for people who wish to see calendar and weather information at a glance in a single screen. The app is $1.99 on the App Store.

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