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Posts tagged with "automation"

Launch Center Pro for iPad Review

Launch Center Pro

Launch Center Pro

Contrast’s Launch Center Pro, the app that started the small revolution of iOS automation in June 2012, arrives today on the iPad with a new version (sold separately at $4.99) that takes everything you know about Launch Center Pro for iPhone and scales it up to the bigger screen. Launch Center Pro for iPad doesn’t do anything dramatically different from its iPhone counterpart: you can create custom actions, play around with Dropbox and clipboard integration, and do all the things that were possible in Launch Center Pro 2.1 – only now on your iPad too.

Finally.

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A Simple “Open In Chrome” Keyboard Maestro Macro for Safari

My problem: I haven’t installed Flash on my Mac and I sometimes need to watch YouTube videos that require Flash Player in Google Chrome. Google’s browser is my Flash shelter: Safari is my main browser and I only keep Chrome around for Flash videos. I was getting annoyed by the process of copying a URL -> launching Chrome -> pasting the URL, so I made a simple Keyboard Maestro macro to automate everything with a hotkey. I don’t know what took me so long.

The macro checks if Safari is the front window, and, if not, it displays a notification with an error message. I do this to prevent accidental hotkey presses for URLs that I don’t want to open in Google Chrome. If Safari is the front window, however, what required a bunch of steps in AppleScript to open the current Safari URL in Chrome is a single action in Keyboard Maestro: Set Google Chrome URL, using %SafariURL% as a variable.

The two additional steps –  Open Chrome and Wait For Chrome To Finish Loading – were necessary because I discovered that, when launched with a Set URL action, Chrome wouldn’t intercept the URL sent by Keyboard Maestro and would simply display a blank tab. In this way, Chrome is launched, paused for a second as it reloads open tabs or the start tab, and then the Safari URL is opened in the current tab. If you want to open the URL in a new tab, change the Set Chrome URL action to New Google Chrome Tab.

You can download the macro here.

Workflow Requests #1→

Earlier today, I asked:

I had some free time, and decided to provide a solution to some of the requests I received. I don’t know if I will repeat this experiment in the future (although it’s likely, because I had fun), but if you have questions, feel free to ask. I don’t see why you shouldn’t speed up that tedious task you’ve been doing over and over on your iPad or iPhone with an action, workflow, or script.

The best part – you can download the actions below and skip this step entirely.


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Automating iOS: A Comprehensive Guide to URL Schemes and Drafts Actions

I started teaching myself how to build and run URL actions with Drafts in early 2013, when I decided to attempt to satisfy Federico Viticci’s Challenge to chain more iOS apps together than he had. I spent a few days feverishly searching for information on URL schemes, learning how to build actions and run them through the Drafts URL action engine, and figuring out the best way to create a chain which connected more than Federico’s record of three apps. When I triumphantly sat back and watched my iPad run an action sequence automatically chaining five apps together (Drafts, Dropbox, Due, Instapaper and Chrome), I had no idea that it would lead to an article being written about me here, starting a blog to have a place to write about the actions I was building, an opportunity to beta test Drafts, and the chance to connect with all kinds of interesting, like-minded people from all over the world.

Since that time, less than a year ago, iOS automation has exploded in power and popularity. It feels like a new app adds support for x-callback-url almost every week. Drafts still stands tall as one of the front runners in the field, having added awesome new features to make far more powerful workflows possible since last February, but other apps compete as well. Launch Center Pro and Pythonista are notable, and the latest challenger, Editorial for iPad, rode in on a blaze of Viticci-inspired glory. So much has changed since the beginning of last year, but there’s one important aspect which, surprisingly, has not. While the field of iOS automation has paraded forward, the gateway into the fun, learning the skills to understand and build the URL actions that make inter-app communication possible, has remained almost unchanged. Information is more readily available from the introduction of many new sources, but it remains scattered and decentralized. The inner workings of URL schemes are not incredibly complex, but when interested individuals must spend hours searching for the right sources all across the internet, the process becomes confusing, boring, and far more time consuming than necessary.

Since I first started The Axx (and created The Action Page as a place to make my actions available to anyone who wanted them), I have been asked again and again if I knew of a place to go to quickly and easily learn how to understand and build these actions. I have grown tired of having no good answer to this question. As a result, I have decided to take my best shot at creating a source for that answer. This article will attempt to centralize all of the necessary information for a complete beginner to quickly and easily go from little to no prior knowledge of the subject to being able to understand and build their own complex workflows with Drafts and URL actions. I will only be focusing on Drafts here, but the skills learned throughout this guide should be easily transferable to other apps, like Launch Center Pro and Editorial. For intermediate, and perhaps even expert action-builders, I will hopefully have some tips that will interest you as well in the last few sections of the article.

Before we begin, be sure to enable the “Allow URLs to trigger actions” setting (found almost all the way to the bottom of the settings pane in Drafts under “URL Security”), which is disabled by default. This setting will allow you to trigger actions externally via URL, a key component to chaining apps together with Drafts, or using apps like Launch Center Pro or Bookmarklets in Safari to run Drafts actions automatically.

So here it is, my Comprehensive Guide to URL Schemes and Drafts Actions. Read more

My iOS Screenshot Generation Workflow

Screenshots

Screenshots

I didn’t think that complaining about iOS status bars on The Prompt would result in Dr. Drang going on a vision quest to produce better screenshots with Python. But I’m glad that I took the time to point out my dislike for messy status bars, because it led the good Doctor to work on some great scripts to automate the entire process with Python, which are compatible with Pythonista for iOS.

I waited to share my workflow for automated screenshot cleaning/generation because I wanted to see where Dr. Drang would end up with his script, Cleanbar. Now that he appears to have settled on a solution that requires standalone image files to act as partial status bar replacements, I think it’s the right time for me to share how I produce iPhone and iPad screenshots for MacStories.

The first step is to set up Cleanbar. I don’t need to repeat what Dr. Drang already explained, but to sum up: grab a black status bar, crop it to get two files similar to Drang’s, then run a script to pack those images as strings. Once set up, you’ll be able to a) use Cleanbar to clean single images picked from the Camera Roll with Pythonista and b) integrate it as cleanbar in other scripts to clean status bars programmatically.

As for my needs:

  • I usually need to combine two iPhone screenshots side-by-side in a single image as you can see in most reviews on this site;
  • I may or may not need to clean their status bars;
  • I don’t have to combine iPad screenshots. I only need to resize them and I may or may not have to clean their status bars;
  • Occasionally, I want to produce a banner with three screenshots (like this one), which can have original or cleaned status bars;
  • Sometimes, I only need to clean one screenshot out of two;
  • I always need to upload the final image to a Dropbox folder, which is monitored by Hazel.

And, because I’m not an animal, I wanted to automate all of this. The scripts that you’ll find below are the result of late night tweaking and lots of tests; they probably aren’t the most elegant or “Pythonic” way to handle this kind of image generation, but they work for me and they make me save several minutes every day. I haven’t been generating review screenshots manually in months, and they’re more flexible than my old workflow based on Keyboard Maestro.

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Save Photos As Reminders with Fantastical and Launch Center Pro

Fantastical and LCP

Fantastical and LCP

I recently realized that I wanted a way to quickly save photos or screenshots as todos, and being Fantastical 2 my todo manager (with Reminders) and Launch Center Pro the fastest way to take pictures and upload them to Dropbox, I combined them in two workflows.

I made two simple actions that mix the Launch Center Pro and Fantastical URL schemes to save a Dropbox image link as a reminder in Fantastical. You retain the ability to type natural language in a Launch Center Pro prompt, and Fantastical will also automatically recognize the URL and put it in the URL field of a reminder.

Some details worth noting about the actions:

  • The first one lets you take a new photo; the second one grabs any image from the Camera Roll;
  • Both actions will upload an image to Dropbox in the Photos/LCP/ folder; you can change this once you install the action;
  • Fantastical is set to create a reminder for the received text through the reminder=1 flag in the URL scheme.

Getting all the encoding right was a bit tricky at first, but the actions should work without any further configuration on your end. Feel free to modify them: with my basic structure in mind, you can replace Fantastical 2 with Drafts, Dispatch, or any other app that can receive text via URL scheme. I just find it handy to be able to quickly save photos in Fantastical as tappable links, but the workflow is really up to your imagination.

You can download the actions here:

Terminology Workflows For Editorial→

Greg Pierce:

Terminology has always had great direct integration with our own apps, Drafts and Phraseology that allows you to easily lookup and select replacement words and have them directly replaced inline with your editing. You can see that integration in action.

In the latest version (3.0.6) of Terminology, I added a tweak to its URL schemes to allow it to integrate more easily with certain other apps, particularly Editorial, Ole Moritz’s excellent iPad text editor.

Terminology is my favorite dictionary app and I wish Editorial had a popover to replace Apple’s default dictionary, like Instapaper did. The workflows are the best alternative to that for now, and they work well.

It would be nice to have selectable synonyms and antonyms built into the system dictionary in iOS 8.

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Insert Markdown Image Links Interactively with Editorial→

Stefan Wolfrum:

Because the markdown documents I write contain usually a few images from web sites I research (not from my iPad image library) and because Editorial includes its own web browser I asked myself: why can’t I just somehow insert a markdown image link in my document to an image that’s on the web page I see in Editorial’s browser? Either I’m missing something or it just isn’t there (yet). Well, because I’m always eager to learn I started to implement exactly that.

One of the most clever workflows I’ve seen in a while. I’m using a similar trick in my Feed Wrangler workflows, and Stefan’s idea can be easily repurposed for other scenarios. Well done.

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Simulating Multiple Cursors in Editorial

Editorial

Editorial

When I’m writing with Editorial or Byword, I miss the multiple cursors feature of Sublime Text. Seemingly an extra geeky addition with no practical utility, multiple cursors had become part of my editing workflow as they allowed me to select multiple positions in a document and act on them at once. For example, I could select multiple lines and prefix them with an asterisk to turn them into a Markdown list, or select multiple instances of a word and modify them with a single keystroke without using Find/Replace or other hacks. The feature was built into Sublime and it was great. So of course I made a workflow for Editorial.

Because it’s the end of the year and I’m feeling festive and thankful, I’m posting two workflows to simulate multiple cursors in Editorial. The first one allows you to save selections for multiple bits of non-contiguous text at once and, when you’re done, wrap them inside any character(s); it’s useful if you want to make multiple words bold/italic, or if you want to enclose them inside parentheses. The second workflow lets you add inline Markdown links for each selection, fetching a webpage URL from the Editorial browser. Read more