My Workflow App Workflows: Share, Affiliate Links, Clean Link
Geeks, rejoice! We have a new nerdy tool to play with on iOS. Its name is Workflow, and it’s really cool. Essentially it’s Automator for iOS.
The good thing about Workflow? Even I can work with x-callback URL’s now.
What do I use the app for? I’m glad you asked.
Share
Based on Vic Hudson’s excellent Workflow to tweet the most recent podcast from Overcast, I built a similar sharing workflow that allows to tweet/post/share any page.
The cool thing about his workflow was/is that it gets the podcast image and attaches it to a tweet, along with the URL and the title of the episode. Kind of neat.
Since I don’t use Overcast, though, it had certain downsides for me. Plus I thought it would be neat if the workflow was able to share any URL. So I came up with this workflow. It takes any URL to download a pages’ title, then it grabs all the images off a webpage, and displays them in Quick Look. Memorize the index (the number) of the image, then tap done. The choose from list dialog comes up. Tap the row that corresponds to the index in Quick Look. First image is first row, second image is second row, etc.
The workflow will take all that stuff and bring up the standard share sheet. This way you can share the attached image as tweet, Facebook post, iMessage, or email. Pretty cool, right?
Here is a short screencast I’ve recorded.
Install the Share workflow on your iOS device.
Affiliate
I saw this one yesterday, and thought it’s a pretty neat idea, on Techedvance. The workflow takes URL, puts them through Clean Links, adds an affiliate tag, and puts everything on the clipboard.
Since I don’t want to use Clean Links, and I just added a clean links option to Markdown for Keyboard Maestro, I thought I can just take that new feature into the workflow. Plus I change the workflow to be more “programmatical”, i.e. the workflow reads more like a program.
At the bottom is a Combine Text action. If you find that your URL’s regularly already contain a ?, change this to &.
Install the Affiliate Link workflow on your iOS device.
Link Clean
An obvious spinoff from the previous Affiliate workflow, is a Link Clean workflow, that only contains the regular expressions to make a URL somewhat cleaner-ish.
Install the Share workflow on your iOS device.
Meditation Timer
I was trying to build a meditation timer, but I find the play sound action is not powerful yet to share this workflow. Essentially you’d add a couple of Wait actions that wait like 60 seconds, play a gong, then wait 13 minutes, play another gong, wait 60 seconds, play a final gong, create a diary entry in Day One.