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Posts tagged with "automation"

Launch Center Pro 2.3 Extends iOS Automation

Released today on the App Store, Launch Center Pro 2.3 is a major update to Contrast’s app launcher and automation tool for iOS that further enhances integration with online services, improves how actions are built and triggered, and that refines several aspects of an app that’s become a key piece of my workflow.

I’ve been covering Launch Center Pro since its humble Pro-less beginnings, and the app has changed dramatically over the years. What started as a simple launcher for apps graduated into a full-blown automation utility for URL schemes and native iOS features, which allowed us to create a complete guide to get started with the app on your iPhone and iPad.1

Launch Center Pro 2.3 brings important improvements that make the app an even better companion for common tasks and advanced workflows. The update is packed with features – David Barnard wasn’t joking when he said that it feels like a 3.0 release – and I believe that Contrast did a great job in integrating them with the rest of the app.

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JavaScript for Automation on OS X Yosemite→

As detailed by Apple in a technical document, OS X Yosemite will add JavaScript support for scripting and automation:

The JavaScript OSA component implements JavaScript for Automation. The component can be used from Script Editor, the global Script Menu, in the Run JavaScript Automator Action, applets/droplets, the osascript command-line tool, the NSUserScriptTask API, and everywhere else other OSA components, such as AppleScript, can be used. This includes Mail Rules, Folder Actions, Address Book Plugins, Calendar Alarms, and Message Triggers.

From the developer session video’s description:

With OS X Yosemite, application scripting support has been added to another popular language, JavaScript. JavaScript for Automation (JXA) extends the standard JavaScript environment provided by the JavaScriptCore framework with support for querying and controlling all of the scriptable applications running in OS X. JXA scripts are supported at all layers of the system and can be invoked from the command-line, from the system-wide Script Menu, and can even be distributed as code-signed applications.

This is an interesting change for automation on OS X going forward, and JavaScript will be available alongside AppleScript in the Script Editor. You can watch the session video “JavaScript for Automation” here or in Apple’s WWDC app.

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Editorial 1.1: Another Step Forward for iOS Automation

Editorial, Ole Zorn’s text automation tool and Markdown editor for iOS, has changed the way I work on my iPad.

Combining an elegant text editing experience with a powerful workflow system based on actions and a built-in Python interpreter, Editorial reinvented iOS automation and explored new horizons of what could be achieved with inter-app comunication on an iPad. Editorial can be just a text editor, but its true potential and versatility are revealed by an Automator-inspired interface that is the foundation for workflows to automate text editing, web services, image manipulation, and more – all on an iPad, without needing a Mac. Editorial sits at the forefront of the post-PC era, and it’s become an indispensable tool for my professional life.

Editorial came out on August 15, 2013. Over the past nine months, I’ve seen Editorial go from a minor 1.0.1 release to a feature-packed, redesigned 1.1 that feels like a 2.0 update – the kind of deep, fundamentally different version of an app that several developers would charge for as a separate product on the App Store.

It’s undeniable that Zorn should have released an update with fixes and basic iOS 7 compatibility sooner, but it’s important to note that Editorial 1.0 (aside from minor issues) kept working well on iOS 7, and Zorn documented the development process with notes and screenshots on the app’s forums. As an Editorial user and reviewer, it’s been a long journey from version 1.0 in August 2013 to today’s 1.1 release, but it’s been worth it.

Editorial 1.1 brings a plethora of design changes, Markdown improvements, and automation breakthroughs that, just ahead of iOS 8, represent a major milestone for Markdown text editors and iOS automation. Editorial 1.1 may be a text editor on the surface, but, in reality, it’s a small revolution for iOS power users.

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Editorial 1.1 Teaser→

In post published yesterday on the Editorial forums, developer Ole Zorn shared more details on Editorial 1.1, announcing some features he’s been working on for the update, such as the ui module, which will allow users to create custom interfaces inside Editorial:

It’s not just a module, there’s also an integrated visual editor for setting things up without code, and in Editorial there’s also a way to build UIs around workflows, without having to write Python at all (though you can also mix and match). Before you get the wrong idea: This is in no way a complete wrapper around UIKit or some kind of Cocoa bridge, so you won’t be able to do a all the things you could do in a native app, but it provides a (hopefully) easy-to-use and pythonic way to create UIs that look and feel “at home” on iOS, and it’s possible do some relatively advanced stuff with custom drawing and touch handling.

For Editorial, I tend to think of this as a “plugin” interface that allows the creation of workflows that are nearly indistinguishable from native features. Obviously, this won’t be for everyone, and there will definitely be a learning curve, but given what I’ve seen this community come up with, I’m pretty confident that it will enable some people to really push the limits of iOS text automation (and others to reap the rewards via shared workflows).

I can’t stress this enough – the new module fundamentally reinvents the way you can build visual workflows in Editorial, and I can’t wait to share more about the workflows I’ve been working on.

Make sure to check out Ole’s post for screenshots of Editorial 1.1 on the iPad and iPhone.

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Drafts 3.6 Brings New Google Drive and Clipboard Actions, Auto-Backup

Drafts, Agile Tortoise’s note-taking app for iOS with support for customizable actions and workflows, has been updated to version 3.6 today, adding Google Drive integration, new clipboard actions, and a handy option to automatically back up a user’s action library to Dropbox every few days.

Google Drive joins Drafts’ existing Dropbox and Evernote actions as it’s based on the same concept: the app can now create text files in your Google Drive account, append/prepend text to existing files, or replace text; every tag that is normally supported by Drafts (such as placeholders for timestamps, date, draft line, or clipboard) will work with Google Drive actions that you can create in the Settings. In my tests, I was able to quickly send text from Drafts to Google Drive by adapting some of my old Dropbox actions, which created a new .txt file in Google Drive and inside a specific folder (Drafts has preference to specify a parent folder for Google Drive actions); overall, if you’ve ever wished you could easily send plain text to notes stored in Google Drive, the addition is welcome.

Append and prepend actions have also been added to Drafts’ iOS clipboard integration: just like with built-in third-party services, Drafts can now append or prepend text to the contents of the clipboard – a feature that may not seem immediately useful, but that could open some interesting possibilities when using the clipboard as a workaround for the lack of automation features in iOS apps.

Aside from adding background refresh support for iOS 7 (for notes stored in the app across the iPhone and iPad versions), Drafts 3.6 also adds a setting for auto-backup: if activated, the app will save actions every few days to Dropbox without having to remember to export an action’s library manually.

Drafts continues to be a must-have utility for text automation on iOS, and version 3.6 is available now on the App Store for the iPhone and iPad.

IFTTT for iOS Gets iPad App, Curated Collections, and Native Notifications

The official IFTTT client for iOS has been updated to version 2.0 today, adding an iPad app and a new channel for iOS Notifications to integrate them with IFTTT recipes. IFTTT, a popular web automation service that supports many third-party apps and services, first arrived on iOS in July 2013 when the company released an iPhone app that featured native Contacts, Reminders, and Photos integration.

As I wrote in my original review, IFTTT brought a different kind of automation to iOS thanks to its native integrations built into the app:

IFTTT brings a different kind of automation to iOS that doesn’t need URL schemes or bookmarklets, but that instead looks into native pieces of data to connect services together. It’s an innovative approach to monitoring photos, contacts, and reminders that are added or modified on an iPhone, but it should be familiar to users who already rely on IFTTT for their daily web automation tasks. While I’m not leaving my Mac mini anytime soon, my photo sharing workflow is faster thanks to IFTTT, and I look forward to seeing how the app will evolve over time both in terms of community recipes and new features. I am especially excited for its future on iOS 7, which could broaden the scope of the app’s background refresh system.

With version 2.0, IFTTT has revamped the initial screen of the app with a gallery of popular recipes and curated collections. Likely in an effort to provide a better explanation of what IFTTT is capable of without requiring users to learn on their own through trial and error, the app now showcases the recently launched collections such as “Recipes for the nature lover” or “Recipes for NYC” that include recipes to get weather alerts for NYC, add a Foursquare check-in to Google Calendar, log trips in a Google Drive document, and more. Read more

iWork Automation→

New website launched today by Otto the Automator after the release of iWork updates that improved AppleScript support considerably:

The whole point of using a productivity suite is to be, well… productive. And the more time you invest in performing repetitive or complex processes, the less productive and creative you become. The reimagined iWork is designed to eliminate the drudgery, with elements, tools, and media libraries, shared by every application in the suite. And now there’s one more thing they have in common: automation with AppleScript.

The site already has a detailed explanation of the updated AppleScript dictionaries (Pages sections, for instance) for iWork, as well as scripts. Here’s one to transform data from Numbers in a vertical bar chart on a new slide in Keynote; this one will create and email encrypted PDF files generated from a Pages template.

Apple seems to have listened to the power user community and there’s lots of AppleScript goodness in the new iWork for OS X. I’m looking forward to knowing more about new features that were added to the dictionaries, and not just the ones that have been brought back.

Check out the iWork Automation website here.

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