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Posts tagged with "iOS"

Chrome for iOS Updated With Messages Sharing, New History Menu

Chrome

Chrome

Released earlier today, Google Chrome for iOS has been updated with built-in Messages sharing and a new menu to access previously-visited webpages.

Available from the Share menu in the top toolbar, Messages integration brings up a modal Messages window to send a webpage’s title and URL to someone else. This is a good addition – I’ve long relied on bookmarklets and third-party apps to forward Chrome links to Messages – but unfortunately one I’ll make little use of, as iOS doesn’t let you quickly address a message to a pre-defined group of contacts.1

I find the new History menu much more interesting for my daily Chrome workflow. Similarly to Safari, you can now tap & hold the Back/Forward buttons to show a list of websites you have navigated to; tapping on one will take you back to that page. Like Apple’s implementation, this is a per-tab history; unlike Safari, the list of pages is shown in a dropdown menu rather than a full-screen modal view (on iPhone).

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iOS Multitasking Lag→

iOS Multitasking Lag

Benjamin Mayo, elaborating on a tweet by our Graham Spencer about a “delay” that occurs when switching between apps using multitouch gestures on the iPad:

The reason for this delay is linked to how iOS ‘freezes’ background applications; the period of inactivity experienced is relative to the time it takes to unfreeze the desired application. For the Settings app, the time necessary to become active is negligible, so it feels instantaneous, but for more complicated apps (like Mail) the thawing process takes longer and becomes noticeable in use. Until that point, touches do nothing because you are effectively looking at a screenshot of the application when you were last open — the app doesn’t receive any touch events at this stage.

Using the iPad every day, I, too, think this is one of the most annoying aspects of relying on the device for work stuff. While Open In would certainly top the list for many people, personally I am more annoyed by that slight delay that occurs every time I switch back and forth between two apps with the four-finger multitasking gesture. The most common scenario is copying bits of text or URLs from a browser and swiping back to a text editor or Evernote to paste them; after swiping, I can’t bring up the Copy & Paste menu instantly, because, like Benjamin says, the app is “suspended” and therefore unresponsive to taps. It is a very specific and minor annoyance, but one that, over time, becomes a detriment to the overall experience. As Graham noted, this doesn’t happen on a Mac, and it shouldn’t happen on an iPad either.

I have also noticed that the iPad mini tends to “flush” apps from memory far more frequently than my iPad 3 did. This happens with any kind of app, but it’s annoying when Safari or Chrome have to reload every tab even if I only switched between 2 or 3 apps; I suppose it’s related to the inferior nature of the iPad mini’s hardware when compared to the latest iPad 3rd and 4th generation models.

I honestly don’t care about seeing “multiple apps” on the iPad’s screen, but I’d love for Apple to find a way to make iOS multitasking less aggressive without compromising battery life, making the process of moving between apps instantaneous as it is on OS X.

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Alex Guyot Chains 5 Apps with Drafts→

Alex Guyot Chains 5 Apps with Drafts

As I expected, people have started experimenting with chaining apps and services using Drafts, and Alex Guyot quickly beat me in chaining 5 apps. From his explanation of the workflow:

Follow the bookmark in Chrome and it will take the URL of the webpage you are on, send it to Drafts as a draft, upload it to Dropbox, send it to Due (where you choose a reminder time for it to remind you), take you back to Drafts, send you to Instapaper (Where you choose to save the link to Instapaper), then send you back to Chrome.

He also posted a quick video showing the workflow in action on his iPad. I like how, unlike me, he chained each action as an x-success parameter of the previous one.

As I’ve argued on multiple occasions here on the site, URL schemes are certainly a stopgap solution to a problem – better inter-app communication on iOS – that I wish Apple will tackle in the near future. However, that doesn’t mean people can’t get real work done with URL schemes and apps today. Looking ahead, I can only imagine new possibilities of iOS automation based on URL schemes that, however, abstract the need of manually building URLs from the end user’s workflow – using a more Automator-like interface to visually represent actions. And, who knows, perhaps in a future version of iOS “switching” between apps won’t even be required anymore, as “parts” of other apps will be linked to each other using something like XPC.

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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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