This week with my iOS device – Automation

What have I been doing with my iPad and iPhone?

This week has been a week of trying out automation on my iOS devices using the new application called Workflow. I have been downloading workflows created by other people and I have made small attempts at making my own workflows within the app. I haven’t had an awful lot of success so far, but I haven’t given up yet. I love all this stuff when you have the computer working for you. It is especially good when you can get things happening by talking to the computer as I demonstrated in the last Mac 20 Questions podcast. I start my day by talking to Siri on my iPad before I have even opened my eyes to the world. How’s that for iPad Productivity?

I was quite excited to get my hands on the Workflow app so that I could do some automation on my iPad. It takes a little while to get your head around how it works. You can run the workflows from within the application, which is what you do when you want to test them. You can also make these workflows work as an extension. Then the other thing you might do is to create an application by having it run from an Icon that you have on your home screen. My favourite thing with this so far as to put the workflows into Launch Centre Pro. Up until now, I haven’t been using Launch Centre Pro as much as I would have liked. Now I have Workflow to use on my iOS devices I have the perfect opportunity to get more use out of it.

Making My Own Workflow

A workflow that would be useful for me would be to have a screenshot that I make on the iPad or iPhone be immediately sent into DeskConnect. So I would have that picture moved magically over to my Mac or another iOS device. There is a bug in the software though because the application Workflow doesn’t seem to recognise the application DeskConnect is actually available on my devices. This is an extra big surprise because both of these applications are made by the same company and you would think that they would definitely not have any problems working together. All I can do is to wait for an updated version of either one of these applications and maybe then they will start working together. I will contact the company and send in a support request. I don’t expect that this support will come back very quickly because it seems they are a small company and this new application Workflow has been very popular over the last couple of days on the Internet. It seems that every man and his dog has got their hands on this application to try out using on their iPads and iPhones.

Popular Post – Blogging on the move with iOS

Downloading Ready-made Workflows

The developers made available a number of workflows ready to be downloaded and installed. Some of these look like they could be useful to me and I have downloaded them to try out. It would be nice if somebody had created the workflow that I wanted to use so that I could install it without any messing about.

So you can use this new Workflow application even if you don’t know anything about iOS coding or automation. It is a simple process of dragging and dropping in actions which are building blocks for making a complete workflow. In the future versions of the application, there will be more actions that will be ready for us to use.