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Posts tagged with "URL Scheme"

Tally and x-callback-url→

Greg Pierce:

Tally 1.1 adds x-callback-url support to our quick-counting app for iPhone. Tally supports two actions, “increment” and “decrement” – with full support of callbacks. This allows Tally to be included in automation workflows with Drafts and other apps – should you feel like you need to keep track of how many times you executed a workflow or similar.

I’ve never had a use for Tally, but this update looks interesting. If, for instance, you were to use a Draft 3.0 action to append text to an Evernote journal, you could integrate Tally to count the times the action is fired every day – perhaps by triggering everything from a Launch Center Pro timed notification.

If you’re looking for more examples, Eric Pramono has some good ones.

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Drafts 3 Review: Better iOS Automation and Workflows

Drafts3

Drafts3

In just a little more than a year, Agile Tortoise’s Drafts has gone from being a quick notepad for small bits of text to a full-featured solution for launching apps, using web services, and chaining multiple apps together – always with a focus on text. With version 2.5, released in January, developer Greg Pierce expanded upon Drafts’ existing support for URL schemes to let users build their own actions and share them with others; in the process, he also updated Drafts to handle advanced operations such as customizable Dropbox write access, strftime timestamps, and deeper x-callback-url support.

Drafts 3.0, released today, is a major update that refines several aspects of version 2.5 and brings powerful new features such as Evernote and Message actions, better action and draft management, tighter Reminders integration, and a way to backup and restore entire sets of actions.

I have been testing Drafts 3.0 for the past month, and, even more than Drafts 2.5, it has become an essential part of my daily workflow.

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Designing An x-callback-url Action With x-cancel Parameter→

When we design an x-callback-url action, we tend to focus on the x-success parameter because we want to get more things done. Yet, when we use these actions, especially the ones that involve two or more chained actions, sometimes we feel the need to cancel the first task and either return to the original app or continue with the second task. Either way, based on our most frequent use cases, we may need to revisit these chained actions and redesign them to include the x-cancel parameter.

Great point by Eric Pramono.

In my articles, I tend to omit x-cancel or only mention it in passing. But it’s essential if you want URL scheme-based workflows to fail gracefully.

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Linked Posts with Drafts and Poster

When we announced a new format for linked posts last week, I hadn’t set up a proper workflow to create linked posts on the iPhone and iPad. Driven by annoyance, I put together a Drafts action and a bookmarklet to help me post links to WordPress with or without additional text and quotes.

Our linked posts use a custom field to link back to the original source and format the clickable titles that you see on the site. Tom Witkin’s Poster is my default app to publish posts on MacStories from iOS, and, fortunately, it has support for calling and assigning values to custom fields from the URL scheme. On the other hand, Agile Tortoise’s Drafts, my favorite app to chain multiple actions together, can launch custom URL actions differentiating between the first line of a note and everything else after it. That seemed like a good opportunity to separate my source URL from any possible text I wanted to add to a linked post. Read more

Ecoute 1.2 With URL Scheme→

Nice update to my favorite iPhone music player: automatic download of missing artwork, iTunes 11-like “Play Next” feature, and a URL scheme (linked above).

We first reviewed Ecoute in August 2012; in October, I added:

The thing I like about Ecoute is that it displays Artists using album thumbnails. The Music app does this only for the Albums view, and then again they’re small thumbnails arranged in a list view. Ecoute is more similar to iTunes’ grid view, which I use on my Mac.

I like the new URL scheme, and especially the search action. I use Rdio on a daily basis, but I keep some albums on my iPhone. With Ecoute 1.2, I can use a Launch Center Pro action to look for a specific artist/album name and view search results for matching artists, albums, and songs. Here’s what it looks like.

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Saving Quotes In Quotebook With Instapaper and Mr. Reader

quotebook

quotebook

I am a fan of Lickability’s Quotebook, an iOS app to save, organize, and rate quotes. In the past two years, I reviewed both the 1.0 and 2.0 versions here on MacStories, calling Quotebook a “simple and elegant” solution. After reading Sean Korzdorfer’s workflow on how to process quotes with Drafts and Pythonista, I realized I wasn’t using two obvious iOS services perfectly suited for the job.

I do most of my reading in Mr. Reader, Instapaper, Google Chrome, and The Magazine. When saving a bit of text in Quotebook, I want to be able to send as much information as possible at once: text, author name, and source. Instapaper and Mr. Reader make this easy; I’ll save the discussion about tips for Chrome and The Magazine for another article.

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A Better Chrome To Safari Bookmarklet

pythonista

pythonista

In January, I tried to put together a bookmarklet to send the webpage currently open in Google Chrome for iOS to Apple’s Safari. That turned out to be a surprisingly complex effort as Google didn’t think offering an “Open In Safari” option would be a good idea, and the app’s URL scheme produced some interesting results when opening and closing Chrome.

I was reminded of the bookmarklet this morning by reader @CNWLshadow, and I realized that I never posted the solution I settled with. It consists of a browser bookmarklet and a Pythonista script, and it works with just one tap.

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Launch Center Pro 1.1

LCP

LCP

Released in December 2011, App Cubby’s Launch Center re-ignited interest in iOS URL schemes – shortcuts to automate communication between apps and get specific things done faster with less manual tapping and interactions. Its direct sequel, Launch Center Pro, was released in the summer of 2012 and doubled down on the entire idea of automating iOS tasks by providing a “Home screen for your actions” to allow users to better and more visually organize their shortcuts.

Launch Center Pro 1.1, released today, focuses on improving three key aspects of Launch Center Pro: native in-app actions, the Action Composer, and TextExpander support in URLs. Read more

Jailbreak Tweak Creates An iOS Services Menu with URL Schemes

I don’t normally cover jailbreak tweaks here at MacStories, but I’m intrigued by ActivityAction after reading Jeff Benjamin’s preview over at iDownloadBlog.

ActivityAction is a an extension of Ryan Petrich’s Action Menu – one of my favorite tweaks when I had a jailbroken device. ActionMenu extends Apple’s Copy & Paste popup menu with additional actions and services to deal with selected text or an app’s content area. ActivityAction adds a button that lets you set up UIActivity-like actions based on app’s bundle identifier and its URL scheme. Read more